The Portable Oscar Wilde
by Oscar Wilde 
On This Page
Description
Includes the following works: Novels- The Portrait of Dorian Gray; Plays-Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest; Writings-De Profundis, Critic as Artist, and Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Very Young; and selections from Lady Windermere's Fan, An Ideal Husband, and A Woman of No Importance. The Picture of Dorian Gray, Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest are accompanied by Wilde's prison memoirs, poems, and selected correspondence.Tags
Recommendations
Member Reviews
I've only read The Picture of Dorian Grey so far, and it took me three years to get to it. The reading was slow going for me, but packed with lines and passages that I had to read several times to savor and mark for later, something I don't normally do. The ending was the kind that hits just right and made me forget any impatience I might have had earlier on.
This humble Penguin paperback is one of the most well thumbed in my library. I have read it from beginning to end many times and still pick it up though we have other individual books. Unfortunately,the name of the editor of this omnibus edition book is mispelled on library thing and if it were changed I think many more copies would emerge.
Ratings
Members
- Recently Added By
Lists
Trinity College Booklist (1951): Class Ten, English Literature
358 works; 5 members
Author Information
1,758+ Works 120,483 Members
Flamboyant man-about-town, Oscar Wilde had a reputation that preceded him, especially in his early career. He was born to a middle-class Irish family (his father was a surgeon) and was trained as a scholarship boy at Trinity College, Dublin. He subsequently won a scholarship to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was heavily influenced by John show more Ruskin and Walter Pater, whose aestheticism was taken to its radical extreme in Wilde's work. By 1879 he was already known as a wit and a dandy; soon after, in fact, he was satirized in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience. Largely on the strength of his public persona, Wilde undertook a lecture tour to the United States in 1882, where he saw his play Vera open---unsuccessfully---in New York. His first published volume, Poems, which met with some degree of approbation, appeared at this time. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd, the daughter of an Irish lawyer, and within two years they had two sons. During this period he wrote, among others, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), his only novel, which scandalized many readers and was widely denounced as immoral. Wilde simultaneously dismissed and encouraged such criticism with his statement in the preface, "There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all." In 1891 Wilde published A House of Pomegranates, a collection of fantasy tales, and in 1892 gained commercial and critical success with his play, Lady Windermere's Fan He followed this comedy with A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and his most famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). During this period he also wrote Salome, in French, but was unable to obtain a license for it in England. Performed in Paris in 1896, the play was translated and published in England in 1894 by Lord Alfred Douglas and was illustrated by Aubrey Beardsley. Lord Alfred was the son of the Marquess of Queensbury, who objected to his son's spending so much time with Wilde because of Wilde's flamboyant behavior and homosexual relationships. In 1895, after being publicly insulted by the marquess, Wilde brought an unsuccessful slander suit against the peer. The result of his inability to prove slander was his own trial on charges of sodomy, of which he was found guilty and sentenced to two years of hard labor. During his time in prison, he wrote a scathing rebuke to Lord Alfred, published in 1905 as De Profundis. In it he argues that his conduct was a result of his standing "in symbolic relations to the art and culture" of his time. After his release, Wilde left England for Paris, where he wrote what may be his most famous poem, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), drawn from his prison experiences. Among his other notable writing is The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), which argues for individualism and freedom of artistic expression. There has been a revived interest in Wilde's work; among the best recent volumes are Richard Ellmann's, Oscar Wilde and Regenia Gagnier's Idylls of the Marketplace , two works that vary widely in their critical assumptions and approach to Wilde but that offer rich insights into his complex character. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Oscar Wilde has a Legacy Library. Legacy libraries are the personal libraries of famous readers, entered by LibraryThing members from the Legacy Libraries group.
All Editions
Some Editions
Series
Belongs to Publisher Series
Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1946; 1981 (revised edition) (revised edition)
- Epigraph
- Art should never try to be popular; the public should try to make itself artistic.
--OSCAR WILDE
The Soul of Man under Socialism - Blurbers
- Shaw, George Bernard
- Original language
- English UK
Classifications
Statistics
- Members
- 558
- Popularity
- 52,616
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (4.39)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper
- ISBNs
- 7
- ASINs
- 6
