Wilde, Oscar - Works (3)

He is the son of a surgeon and of an ambitious literary woman; he was born in Dublin in 1854.
He attended the Trinity College in Dublin; then, he went to Oxford and he took a degree in Classics.
He was a disciple of Walter Pater, the theorist of Aestheticism in England; he promoted the theory of “Art for Art’s Sake”.
Then, he left Oxford and he moved to London, where he soon became a celebrity for his wit and his dress as a dandy.
1881: Wilde edited Poems and then was engaged for a tour in the United States.

When he arrived in New York, he told the reporters that Aestheticism was a search for the beautiful, a science through which men looked for the relationship between painting, sculpture and poetry, which were considered simply different forms of the same truth.
Wilde, in America, became famous for his irony, his attitudes and his poses.
1883: he came back in Europe and he married a woman, Constance Lloyd.
He was considered a great talker; also his remarks appeared in the most fashionable London magazines.
In the late 1880’s, Wilde produced a series of short stories: The Canterville Ghost, Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, written for his two children; and then he came out with a novel too, The Picture of Dorian Gray, in 1891.
Then, he developed his interest in drama; in fact, in the late 1890’s he produced several plays which were very successful on the London stage: Lady Windermere’s Fan, A Woman of No Importance (1893) and his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest, in 1895.
However, after the publication in 1893 of Salomé, a tragedy written in French, Wilde’s reputation became to be damaged.
1891: he met the young Lord Alfred Douglas, called Bosie, and with him he had an affair. Then the boy’s father, the Marquess of Queensbury, forced a public trial: so Wilde was convicted of homosexual practices and he was sentenced of two-years of hard labour.
In prison he wrote De Profundis: it was a long letter for Bosie, and it was published in 1905.
When he was released, he was a broken man: his wife refused him and so Wilde went into exile in France; there, he lived his last years in poverty.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol is a work of 1898, that Wilde published under his prison identity, C.3.3., and it is his last work.
He died of meningitis in Paris in 1900.