The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

by Wilde, Oscar

• ISBN13: 9781416500278
• ISBN10: 1416500278
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2005-05-01
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Summary

Flamboyant and controversial, Oscar Wilde was a dazzling personality, a master of wit, and a dramatic genius whose sparkling comedies contain some of the most brilliant dialogue ever written for the English stage. Here in one volume are his immensely popular novel, "The Picture of Dorian Gray"; his last literary work, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," a product of his own prison experience; and four complete plays: Lady Windermere's Fan, his first dramatic success, "An Ideal Husband," which pokes fun at conventional morality, "The Importance of Being Earnest," his finest comedy, and "Salome," a portrait of uncontrollable love originally written in French and faithfully translated by Richard Ellmann. Every selection appears in its entirety-a marvelous collection of outstanding works by the incomparable Oscar Wilde, who's been aptly called "a lord of language" by Max Beerbohm.

Author Biography

Oscar Wilde was born on October 16, 1854, to the Irish nationalist and writer “Speranza” Wilde and the doctor William Wilde. After graduating from Oxford in 1878, Wilde moved to London, where he became notorious for his sharp wit and flamboyant style of dress.

Though he was publishing plays and poems throughout the 1880s, it wasn’t until the late 1880s and early 1890s that his work started to be received positively. In 1895, Oscar Wilde was tried for homosexuality and was convicted and sentenced to two years in prison. Tragically, this downfall came at the height of his career, as his plays, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were playing to full houses in London. He was greatly weakened by the privations of prison life, and moved to Paris after his sentence. Wilde died in a hotel room, either of syphilis or complications from ear surgery, in Paris, on November 30, 1900.