Oscar Wilde (born 1854, Dublin, died 1900, Paris) is an Irish writer, poet and dramatist whose reputation 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). He was the best representative for the late 19th-century Aesthetic movement in England, which advocated art for art’s sake, but also the object of civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment. Wilde was born of professional and literary parents, his father was a surgeon who also published books, and his mother was a revolutionary poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore.
After attending Portora Royal School he went to Trinity College, Dublin, and Magdalen College, Oxford, which awarded him a degree with honours. In the early 1880s, when Aestheticism was the rage and despair of literary London, he established himself in social and artistic circles by his wit and flamboyance. Wilde published, at his own expense, Poems(1881), and, eager for further acclaim, agreed to lecture in the United States and Canada in 1882, announcing on his arrival at customs in New York City that he had “nothing to declare but his genius”. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd and had two children born in 1885 and 1886. During this period he published The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888) which reveals his gift for romantic allegory in the form of the fairy tale.
In the final decade of his life, Wilde wrote and published nearly all of his major work. He published his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, two volumes of stories and fairy tales testifying to his extraordinary creative inventiveness: Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranates. But his greatest successes were his comedies where he employed his paradoxical, epigrammatic wit to create a form of comedy new to the 19th-century English theatre. His first success was Lady Windermere’s Fan and a second comedy, A Woman of No Importance (1893), convinced the critic William Archer that Wilde’s plays “must be taken on the very highest plane of modern English drama.” In rapid succession Wilde’s final plays, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were produced early in 1895.
His close friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, whom he had met in 1891, infuriated the marquess of Queensberry, Douglas’s father. Accused by the marquess of being a sodomite, Wilde, urged by Douglas, sued for criminal libel. The case collapsed when the evidence went against him, and he dropped the suit. Urged to flee to France by his friends, Wilde refused, unable to believe that his world was at an end. He was arrested and ordered to stand trial. Wilde testified brilliantly, but the jury failed to reach a verdict. In the retrial he was found guilty and sentenced, in May 1895, to two years at hard labour. Most of his sentence was served at Reading Gaol.
In May 1897 he was released a bankrupt and immediately went to France, hoping to regenerate himself as a writer. His only remaining work,The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), revealed his concern for inhumane prison conditions. He was visited by such loyal friends as Max Beerbohm and Robert Ross, later his literary executor; he was also reunited with Douglas. He died suddenly of acute meningitis brought on by an ear infection. In his semiconscious final moments, he was received into the Roman Catholic Church, which he had long admired.
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"Oscar Wilde." Encyclopædia Britannica. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. Encyclopædia Britannica Inc., 2012. Web. 13 Jan. 2012.
Oscar Wilde (born 1854, Dublin, died 1900, Paris) is an Irish writer, poet and dramatist whose reputation rests on his only novel, 
In the final decade of his life, Wilde wrote and published nearly all of his major work. He published his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, two volumes of stories and fairy tales testifying to his extraordinary creative inventiveness: Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranates. But his greatest successes were his comedies where he employed his paradoxical, epigrammatic wit to create a form of comedy new to the 19th-century English theatre. His first success was Lady Windermere’s Fan and a second comedy, A Woman of No Importance (1893), convinced the critic William Archer that Wilde’s plays “must be taken on the very highest plane of modern English drama.” In rapid succession Wilde’s final plays, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were produced early in 1895.