Oscar Wilde

Born Oscar Fingal O’Fflahertie Wills Wilde on October 16, 1854, in Dublin, the second son of Sir William Wilde, a distinguished eye surgeon, and Jane Francesca Wilde, a poet and Irish nationalist who wrote under the pen name "Speranza," he grew up in a household steeped in language, wit, and intellectual ambition. He excelled as a classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin and then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he studied under Walter Pater and John Ruskin and absorbed the philosophy of aestheticism that would define his public persona. Moving to London, he made himself the most visible literary figure of the age through sheer force of personality, his epigrams and conversation becoming as famous as his published works. His fairy tales , "The Happy Prince" (1888), "The Selfish Giant" (1888) , revealed a tenderness beneath the wit. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), his only novel, scandalized reviewers with its exploration of beauty, corruption, and the double life. But it was the theater that made him triumphant: Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and above all The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), a comedy of such perfect construction and devastating verbal brilliance that it remains the finest comedy of manners in the English language. At the height of his fame, he was prosecuted for gross indecency over his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas, convicted in May 1895, and sentenced to two years of hard labor. De Profundis (1897), written from Reading Gaol, and "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1898) emerged from that suffering. He died in exile in Paris on November 30, 1900, at the age of forty-six, reportedly quipping on his deathbed, "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do."