Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was an Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose enduring fame rests on his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). In his comedies he proved himself to be a master of the epigram. He was a spokesman for the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England, which advocated art for art’s sake, and he was the object of notorious civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment (1895–97). Despite his fall from society’s grace at the end of his life, Wilde came to be regarded as the personification of wit and sophistication.