During his last year in prison, he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in 1905), a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. After two more trials he was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. The libel trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men.
The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.Īt the height of his fame and success, while The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) was still being performed in London, Wilde prosecuted the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. He wrote Salome (1891) in French while in Paris but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. The opportunity to construct aesthetic details precisely, and combine them with larger social themes, drew Wilde to write drama. 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).
Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.Īs a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art" and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. At university, Wilde read Greats he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Oxford.
A young Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright.
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