His father, Sir William Wilde, was an important surgeon, and his mother was an Irish nationalist poet. Augustine (also rec’d by Martin Luther King Jr. Note on Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal OFlahertie Wilde was born on 16 October 1854 in Dublin, Ireland. Find a list of the works included in Wilde’s prison library below (compiled by The Independent) and more insight into his personal library via Thomas Wright’s Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde.Ĭity of God by St. Though the celebrated writer would pass away just three years after his release, his wit and wisdom continues to inspire readers the world over. In 1884 he married and had two sons, for whom he probably wrote his first book of fairy tales, The Happy Prince. In 1882 Wilde gave a one year lecture tour of America, visiting Paris in 1883 before returning to New York for the opening of his first play Vera. I feel sure that a complete set of their works would be as great a boon to many amongst the other prisoners as it certainly would be to myself.” He is famous for his comic masterpieces Lady Windermeres Fan and The Importance of Being Earnest, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wildes only novel). Rosetti) and Wilde seems to have consciously styled himself on this figure. But there is Oscar the idea too: the symbol, the representative, the totem, the global icon which looms above the other identities. Oscar Wilde lived more lives than one, and no single biography can ever compass his rich and extraordinary life, Neil McKenna tells us at the beginning of The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde. In one letter asking for new books, Wilde wrote: “The Library here contains no example of Thackeray’s or Dickens’s novels. Wildean Oscar the man, Oscar the life, Oscar the tragedy, Oscar the standard bearer for art, Irishness, queerness, intellect and wit we all know. In 1891, he published Intentions, an essay collection arguing the. In 1895, Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years of hard labor for charges of “gross indecency.” Over his time at Reading Gaol, the Irish poet and playwright was granted special permission to keep books in his cell, amass a small library, and leave his light on late to read them.Īmong the first titles requested were The Confessions of St Augustine and The Renaissance by Walter Pater, a key artistic text that helped inspire Wilde’s aesthetic. In 1888, seven years after he wrote Poems, Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a collection of childrens stories.
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