Author Biography

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 - 30 November 1900) was a prolific Irish writer who wrote plays, fiction, essays, and poetry. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death. Wilde's parents were successful Anglo-Irish, Dublin intellectuals. Their son became fluent in French and German early in life. At university, Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.

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