Oscar Wilde

Who is Oscar Wilde?

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 to prominent intellectual parents. Educated at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford, he became the leading exponent of aestheticism and one of London's most celebrated wits and playwrights in the 1890s. His comedies of manners — Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband and especially The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) — are still performed constantly for their dazzling epigrams and social satire. His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), remains a Gothic classic. At the height of his fame Wilde was convicted of 'gross indecency' in 1895 and imprisoned for two years, an experience that produced the reflective De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol. Ruined and exiled, he died in Paris in 1900.

Sources: Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) · Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890) · Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (1987)