Who was Oscar Wilde? : Biography of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He is the son of an Irish surgeon of international repute. His mother, Jane Elgee Francesa, is a fervent nationalist poetess, who in the 1840s, supported the Irish cause against England.

After classical studies at Trinity College, Dublin, where he already showed a strong personality and is distinguished from other students by the extravagance of his clothes, Oscar Wilde was admitted to the University of Oxford. In particular, as Professor John Ruskin, one of the spokesmen of a cultural movement that believes that art should only be sought by the Beautiful, without any moral or social concern. Oscar Wilde was a brilliant student and distinguished. He has long hair, wearing ascot ties and adorns the buttonholes of his costume of a carnation, a read or a chrysanthemum.

Subtle mind and eccentric dandy of rare elegance, his fame is great in the cultural and aristocratic Londoners who Delight in his early poems (1881). It quickly became one of the theorists of "art for art's sake", and the leader of the "aesthetes." He was also invited to give a series of conferences in the United States on aesthetics.

Back in Europe, he moved to Paris, where he wrote two plays (The Duchess of Padua, 1883), Vera or the Nihilists, 1883). He meets the main French writers of the time: Verlaine, Mallarm�, Zola, Daudet and Hugo. Back in London (1884), he married one of his admirers, Constance Lloyd. They had two children. Editor of Woman's World magazine from 1887 to 1889, he shows his talents as a pamphleteer and his art of paradox. It also works to defend the feminist cause.

For his children, he organized costume balls and writing stories (the Happy Prince and Other Stories, 1888). It also publishes news (Crime of Lord Arthur Saville and Other Stories, 1891), essay (Intentions, 1891) and also his only novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891). This novel has earned an excellent reputation, but the English public, shocked, reproached the immorality of certain characters.

In 1895, Oscar Wilde decides to file a complaint for libel against the Marquess of Queensberry, father of Alfred Douglas, his lover. This process goes wrong. Finally it is the Marquis of Queensberry bringing the matter to court, accusing Wilde of perverting his son. Oscar Wilde is convicted of the crime of homosexuality to two years hard labor May 27, 1895. He will serve the sentence in the very repressive prison Reading, southern England. He gets out of prison May 19, 1897, and went into exile in France, Berneval, near Dieppe. He is a man broken and ruined. It takes as pseudonym the name of Sebastian Melmoth. He published in 1898, the ballad of Reading Gaol, a moving testimony about her pain as a prisoner. He died in Paris in 1900 in poverty and solitude.