"Anybody can write a three-volume novel. It merely requires a complete ignorance of both life and literature."

Irish poet and dramatist whose reputation rests on his comic masterpieces Lady Wintermere's Fan and The Importance of Being Ernest. Among Wilde's best known works are also his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, which deals very similar theme as Robert Luis Stevenson's Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde. Wilde's fairy tales are still very popular - the motifs have been compared to those of Hans Christian Andersen.

Wilde was born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford. His lifestyle and humourous wit made him soon spokesman for Aestheticism, the late 19th century movement in England that advocated art for art's sake.

Although married and the father of two children, Wilde's personal life was opent to rumours. His years of triumph ended dramatically, when his intimate association with Lord Alfred Douglas led to his trial on charges of homosexuality (then illegal in Britain). He was sentenced two years hard labour for the crime of sodomy. During his first trial Wilde defended himself, that "the 'Love that dare not speak its name' in this century is such a great affection of an eleder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosphy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare... There is nothing unnatural about it." Mr. Justice Wills, stated when pronouncing the sentence, that "people who can do these things must be dead to all senses of shame, and one cannot hope to produce any effect upon them."

After his release in 1897 Wilde wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol revealing his concern for inhumane prison conditions. He died on November 30, 1900, penniless in a cheap Paris hotel at the age of 46.

"Everything about my tragedy has been hideous, mean, repellent, lacking in style. Our very dress makes us grotesques. We are the zanies of sorrow. We are the clowns whose hearts are broken." (De Profundis) - Quotations from Oscar Wilde, An Illustrated Anthology, Crescent Books 1995

SEE ALSO: André Gide, John Keats

Selected bibliography:

• Ravenna, 1878
• Poems, 1881
• Happy Prince and Other Tales, 1888
• The House of Pomegranates, 1891
• Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and other Stories, 1891
• Intentions, 1891 - includes The Decay of Lying (1889)
• The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891 - Filmed several times. Classic movie version in 1945, dir. and written by Albert Lewin. Soft-porn version in 1978: Take Off. Innumerable stage versions. SEE ALSO: Faust theme and J.W. Goethe
• Salomé, drame en un acte1892 - trans. as Salome: A Tragedy in One Act
• Lady Wintermere's Fan, 1893
• A Woman of No Importance, 1893
• Poems in Prose, 1893-94, coll. 1905
• The Sphinx, 1894
• An Ideal Husband, 1895
• The Importance of Being Ernest, 1895
• De Profundis, 1895
• The Canterville Ghost, 1887 - filmed four times : 1944, dir. by Jules Dassin; 1986, dir by Paul Bogart; 1990, dir. by Al Guest and 1995, dir. by Syd Macartney
• The Ballad of Reading Gaol, 1898
• A Florentine Tragedy, 1908
• The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, 1931