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Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer and poet born in the year 1854 and he became most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890's.People still remember for his epigrams..

He was fluent in French and German in his early life and proved to be an outstanding classicist at Dublin and then in Oxford. His involvement in aestheticism was widely recognized and he tried his hand at various literary activities.

His masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest(1895) was still in stage when he was arrested for gross indecency with other men. In the prison itself he wrote De Profundits that comprised of his spiritual journey.

His life has fascinated many people and numerous biographies have written since his death. Many of his biographies are said to be exaggerated and inaccurate. Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions offered a good literary view of Wilde's ife however many criticized many of the facts are not true at all.

Poetry

• Ravenna (1878)
• Poems (1881)
• The Sphinx (1894)
• The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

Plays

• Vera; or, The Nihilists (1880)
• The Duchess of Padua (1883)
• Salome (French version) (1893, first performed in Paris 1896)
• Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)
• A Woman of No Importance (1893)
• Salome: A Tragedy in One Act: Translated from the French of Oscar Wilde by Lord Alfred Douglas, illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley (1894)
• An Ideal Husband (1895) (text)
• The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) (text)
• La Sainte Courtisane and A Florentine Tragedy Fragmentary. First published 1908 in Methuen's Collected Works

Prose

• The Canterville Ghost (1887)
• The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888, fairy tales)
• The Decay Of Lying (First published in 1889, republished in Intentions 1891)
• Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891)
• Intentions (1891, critical dialogues and essays, comprising The Critic as Artist, The Decay of Lying, Pen, Pencil and Poison and The Truth of Masks)
• The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891, Wilde's only novel)
• A House of Pomegranates (1891, fairy tales)
• The Soul of Man under Socialism (First published in the Pall Mall Gazette, 1891, first book publication 1904)
• Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young (First published in the Oxford student magazine The Chameleon, December, 1894)
• De Profundis (1905)
• The Rise of Historical Criticism (published in incomplete form 1905 and completed form in 1908)
• The Letters of Oscar Wilde (1960) Re-released in 2000, with letters uncovered since 1960, and new, detailed, footnotes by Merlin Holland.
• Teleny or The Reverse of the Medal (Paris, 1893) has been attributed to Wilde, but was more likely a combined effort by a several of Wilde's friends, which he may have edited.