Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish writer, born in Dublin to a surgeon and a nationalist poet, who took a double first at Oxford and went to London to be famous, first as a talker and aesthete and then as an author. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), the fairy tales and four comedies culminating in The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) made him the most celebrated writer in England. That year his libel suit against the Marquess of Queensberry collapsed and he was sentenced to two years' hard labor. In prison he wrote De Profundis. He died in a Paris hotel at forty-six, bankrupt and under an assumed name.