About the Author

Oscar Wilde was born in Ireland in 1854 and educated in Dublin and Oxford. He became the leading exponent of aestheticism and a famous wit, intellectual and raconteur. He wrote children's stories, poetry, philosophical essays and several hugely popular plays, but The Picture of Dorian Gray was his only novel. The book was a succ s de scandale, and later used as evidence against Wilde at the Old Bailey in 1895, when he was tried and imprisoned for homosexual acts. Wilde died in 1900 in exile in Paris.