Quick Facts
- NAME: Oscar Wilde
- OCCUPATION: Writer
- BIRTH DATE: October 16, 1854
- DEATH DATE: November 30, 1900
- EDUCATION: Portora Royal School, Trinity College, Magdalen College
- PLACE OF BIRTH: Dublin, Ireland
- PLACE OF DEATH: Paris, France
Best Known For
Author Oscar Wilde published several works, including The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest.
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Oscar Wilde - How to Tell a Story
Oscar Wilde's father was Ireland's leading eye surgeon and was knighted in 1864.
Oscar Wilde - A Place in History
Oscar Wilde died at age 46 on November 30, 1900 from meningitis.
Oscar Wilde - Leading a Double Life
Oscar Wilde sued the Marquis de Queensburg for libel, lost, and wound up in jail for gross indecency because of his homosexuality.
Oscar Wilde - An Extravagant Life
Although he was married to Constance Lloyd, Wilde spent nights in a hotel with Lord Alfred Douglas. It was his most prolific writing period.
Oscar Wilde. (2012). Biography.com. Retrieved 10:51, Feb 08, 2012 from http://www.biography.com/people/oscar-wilde-9531078
Oscar Wilde [Internet]. 2012. http://www.biography.com/people/oscar-wilde-9531078, February 08
" Oscar Wilde." 2012. Biography.com 08 Feb 2012, 10:51 http://www.biography.com/people/oscar-wilde-9531078
' Oscar Wilde', Biography.com,(2012) http://www.biography.com/people/oscar-wilde-9531078 [accessed Feb 08, 2012]
" Oscar Wilde," Biography.com, http://www.biography.com/people/oscar-wilde-9531078 (accessed Feb 08, 2012).
Oscar Wilde [Internet]. Biography.com; 2012 [cited 2012 Feb 08]. Available from: http://www.biography.com/people/oscar-wilde-9531078.
Oscar Wilde, http://www.biography.com/people/oscar-wilde-9531078 (last visited Feb 08, 2012).
Oscar Wilde, http://www.biography.com/people/oscar-wilde-9531078 (last visited Feb 08, 2012).
Synopsis
Irish writer Oscar Wilde became a London celebrity for his plays such as The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. While married to Constance Lloyd, he began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas in 1891. Wilde sued for libel when Douglas' father accused him of being homosexual. After losing the suit, Wilde was arrested for gross indecency and sentenced to two years of hard labor.
Quotes
"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars."
"I can resist everything except temptation."
"America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up."
Profile
(born Oct. 16, 1854, Dublin, Ire.—died Nov. 30, 1900, Paris, France) Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose reputation rests on his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He was a spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England, which advocated art for art's sake, and he was the object of celebrated civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment (1895–97).
Wilde was born of professional and literary parents. His father, Sir William Wilde, was Ireland's leading ear and eye surgeon, who also published books on archaeology, folklore, and the satirist Jonathan Swift. His mother, who wrote under the name Speranza, was a revolutionary poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore.
After attending Portora Royal School, Enniskillen (1864–71), Wilde went, on successive scholarships, to Trinity College, Dublin (1871–74), and Magdalen College, Oxford (1874–78), which awarded him a degree with honours. During these four years, he distinguished himself not only as a Classical scholar, a poseur, and a wit but also as a poet by winning the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878 with a long poem, Ravenna. He was deeply impressed by the teachings of the English writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater on the central importance of art in life and particularly by the latter's stress on the aesthetic intensity by which life should be lived. Like many in his generation, Wilde was determined to follow Pater's urging “to burn always with [a] hard, gemlike flame.” But Wilde also delighted in affecting an aesthetic pose; this, combined with rooms at Oxford decorated with objets d'art, resulted in his famous remark, “Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china!”
In the early 1880s, when Aestheticism was the rage and despair of literary London, Wilde established himself in social and artistic circles by his wit and flamboyance. Soon the periodical Punch made him the satiric object of its antagonism to the Aesthetes for what was considered their unmasculine devotion to art. And in their comic opera Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan based the character Bunthorne, a “fleshly poet,” partly on Wilde. Wishing to reinforce the association, Wilde published, at his own expense, Poems (1881), which echoed, too faithfully, his discipleship to the poets Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Keats. Eager for further acclaim, Wilde agreed to lecture in the United States and Canada in 1882,
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