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Oscar Wilde (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

Born Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde in 1854, the son of an eccentric poet and a controversial surgeon, Oscar Wilde seemed destined to be anything but “plain Oscar.” Indeed, during his early twenties at Oxford University he began in earnest to create himself as an extraordinary man who was not only something of a dandy in his dress and personal furnishings, but also a brilliant wit in his conversation and his art.

Based on a relatively small output of writing during and shortly after his Oxford days, Wilde easily entered the social world of the end-of-the-century aesthetes and quickly became their lionized darling, even before the publication of his best-known works, THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST and THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY, confirmed his brilliance.

Wilde’s passionate nature and prideful self-image, however, soon led to a tragic fall. According to Ellmann, he wanted a consuming passion; when he met Lord Alfred Douglas, the young and beautiful son of the brutal Marquess of Queensberry, he got that passion and was indeed consumed by it. Queensberry’s hatred of Wilde led him to make a public accusation of sodomy, to which Wilde foolishly responded with a libel charge. After losing that case, his own trial on a charge of committing indecent acts followed soon after.

The story of Wilde’s public humiliation, his brutal imprisonment, his subsequent exile, his abandonment by many of his former admirers, and his lonely, poverty-stricken death at the age of forty-six is recounted by Ellmann in sympathetic detail.

The result of twenty years of research and writing, completed just before his death in 1987, OSCAR WILDE is the crowning achievement of Richard Ellmann’s distinguished career

Sources for Further Study

The Atlantic. CCLXI, February, 1988, p. 84.

Booklist. LXXXIV, January 1, 1988, p. 729.

The Christian Science Monitor. LXXX, March 7, 1988, p. 20.

Commentary. LXXXV, April, 1988, p. 78.

Drama: The Quarterly Theatre Review. CLXVII, 1988, p. 51.

Library Journal. CXII, December, 1987, p. 114.

London Review of Books. IX, October 29, 1987, p. 12.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. February 14, 1988, p. 3.

The Nation. CCXLVI, February 13, 1988, p. 203.

The New Republic. CXCVIII, February 15, 1988, p. 25.

The New York Review of Books. XXXV, February 18, 1988, p. 3.

The New York Times Book Review. XCIII, February 21, 1988, p. 3.

The New Yorker. LXIV, March 21, 1988, p. 117.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXXII, November 27, 1987, p. 74.

Time. CXXXI, January 4, 1988, p. 69.

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