Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) was an Irish writer born in Dublin and educated at Trinity College Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became the best-known voice of the Aesthetic movement. He wrote fairy tales (The Happy Prince and Other Tales, 1888), one novel, criticism such as The Decay of Lying, and the comedies that crowned his career, from Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) to The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). After his trials in 1895 he served two years in prison, wrote De Profundis and The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and died in Paris in 1900, having been received into the Catholic Church on his deathbed.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is Oscar Wilde's only novel, a moral fable told in the polished language of the London drawing room. In the studio of the painter Basil Hallward, the witty Lord Henry Wotton sees an unfinished portrait of an extraordinarily handsome young man and insists on meeting its subject.
