Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish author, poet and playwright. After writing in different literary styles throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular and influential dramatists in London in the early 1890s. He was a key figure in the emerging Aestheticism movement of the late 19th century and is widely regarded as the greatest playwright of the Victorian era. Wilde is best known for his Gothic novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), his epigrams, plays and bedtime stories for children, as well as his criminal conviction in 1895 for gross indecency and for practicing homosexual acts.

Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde became conversant in French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism during this time, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.

Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Wilde returned to drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England complicated by a prohibition on the portrayal of biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.