Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde is known for his literary works, masterful comedies, wit, and jail sentence. Read on to find out more about his life.
Oscar Wilde
Born: 16 October 1854, Westland Row, Dublin, Ireland
Died: 30 November 1900, Paris, France
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. He wrote in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for –
- his epigrams and plays
- his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, (1891)
- his masterful comedies of manners Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
- his wit and flamboyance
- 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.
Read one of his works
The Nightingale and the Rose
Family
Oscar Wilde came from a prominent family. His father, Sir William Wilde, was a leading ear and eye surgeon in Ireland, who also published books on archaeology, folklore, and the satirist Jonathan Swift. His mother wrote under the name Speranza, and was a revolutionary poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore.
Education
Oscar Wilde studied at Oxford in the 1870s. Here he gained notice as a scholar, poseur, wit, and poet and for his devotion to the Aesthetic movement – held that art should exist for its beauty alone.