Complete Humorous Horror of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams and plays, and the circumstances of his imprisonment which was followed by his early death.


At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).

He wrote Salome (1891) in French in Paris but it was refused a licence. Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London.

At the height of his fame and success, while his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), was still on stage in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry, the father of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, prosecuted for libel, a charge carrying a penalty of up to two years in prison.

In prison he wrote De Profundis (written in 1897 & published in 1905), a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. Upon his release he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life. He died destitute in Paris at the age of forty-six.


Contents

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Salome : a tragedy in one act

The Ballad of Reading Gaol

De Profundis

An Ideal Husband (1895)

The Canterville Ghost (1906)

A Woman of No Importance (1893)

The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888)

Lady Windermere's Fan (1917)

The Soul of Man under Socialism (1904)

Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891)

Essays and Lectures

Poems (1881)

Intentions (1891)

Selected Prose of Oscar Wilde

A House of Pomegranates (1915)

Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man (1911)

A Critic in Pall Mall: Being Extracts from Reviews and Miscellanies (1919)

The Duchess of Padua (1883)

Impressions of America (1906)

Vera; Or, The Nihilists (1902)

Shorter Prose Pieces

Children in Prison and Other Cruelties of Prison Life


An Ideal Husband (1895)

This comedy revolves around blackmail and political corruption, and touches on public and private honour over the course of a twenty-four hour period.


The Canterville Ghost (1906)

An amusing chronicle of the tribulations of the Ghost of Canterville Chase when his ancestral halls became the home of the American Minister to the Court of St. James.