Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde (English: Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde, October 16, 1854 - November 30, 1900) was a poet and playwright born in Dublin, Ireland. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is best known for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for consensual homosexuality in "one of the first celebrity trials". His parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals from Dublin. The young Wilde learned to speak French and German fluently. In college, Wilde read the classics of the Greek and Roman eras; he proved himself a distinguished classicist first at Trinity College, Dublin, and then at Oxford University. Led by his two mentors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin, he became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism. After graduating from university, Wilde moved to London to enter fashion culture and social circles. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he experimented with various literary activities: publishing collections of poetry, lecturing on the new "British Renaissance" and interior decoration in the United States and Canada, before returning to London to become a prolific journalist. Known for his razor-sharp wit, flamboyant dress, and conversational skills, Wilde became one of the most famous figures of his time. At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his vision of the primacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The opportunity to precisely construct aesthetic details and combine them with larger social themes attracted Wilde to writing plays. He wrote Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but could not have it performed there because of a British ban on stage depictions of biblical themes at the time. In the early 1890s, Wilde wrote four social comedies that made him one of the best-known playwrights of late-Victorian London. At the height of his fame and success, while "No Child's Play" (1895) was still playing in London, Wilde sued the Marquess of Queensberry for libel. The Marquis was the father of Oscar Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.