About the book:
The comedies that made Wilde the wittiest man in any room he entered epigrams doing the structural work plot does for lesser writers.
Reads as fast and sharp now as it did in 1895, right before it got him destroyed.
Condition:
Great secondhand condition.
Shelf wear.
Mild damage to top spine as pictured.
Age related tanning to pages.
All pages well bound and intact.
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About the author:
Oscar Wilde (1854 to 1900)
Born Oscar Fingal OFlahertie Wills Wilde in Dublin in 1854 to prominent Anglo-Irish parents (his mother was a poet and nationalist, his father a celebrated surgeon), Oscar Wilde was educated at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford, where he became a star of the aesthetic movement. Famous for his wit, flamboyant style, and championing of art for arts sake, he rose to become one of the most celebrated figures in late-Victorian London society before his dramatic fall.
His early success came with poetry and essays, but it was his playsespecially The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)and his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/1891) that made him a household name. Wilde developed a dazzling, epigrammatic style full of paradox, irony, and linguistic brilliance that masked deeper moral and philosophical concerns.
Deeply influenced by the aestheticism of Walter Pater and John Ruskin, French symbolists, and classical literature, Wilde in turn became one of the most influential figures in modern literature and queer cultural history. He profoundly shaped writers such as Evelyn Waugh, Noël Coward, Gore Vidal, and later authors exploring wit, identity, performance, and the tension between art and morality. He remains a central figure for LGBTQ+ literature and camp aesthetics.
Recurring preoccupations include the conflict between appearance and reality, the dangers of hedonism and hypocrisy, the nature of art and beauty, the performance of identity, and the cruelty of Victorian morality. Major works include The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, Salomé, De Profundis, and his fairy tales.
After his conviction for gross indecency in 1895 and imprisonment, Wilde lived in exile in France under the name Sebastian Melmoth. He died in Paris in 1900 at the age of 46, broken but defiant.
Oscar Wildes influence on world literature and culture is immense: he perfected the art of the epigram, championed aesthetic freedom, and became a tragic icon of queer suffering and resilience while remaining utterly unique in his blend of brilliance, wit, and profound moral insight.
