A writer, editor, lecturer, great wit and conversationalist, was born in Dublin, Ireland where he spent most of his childhood.
He began writing at Oxford, England, and published his first book of poems in 1881. He was a believer of 'Art for Art's Sake' - the doctrine that beauty of form and style alone can justify art, independently of content or purpose.
Wilde's works include charming fairy tales, the erotically bizarre The Picture of Dorian Gray and the play Salome, and society comedies sparkling with paradoxical epigrams that are among the most quoted in the English Language.

Of the comedies, the last one to be written, universally considered to be Wilde's most perfect piece: The Importance Of Being Earnest (1895), was first performed in London in St. James Theatre, just three months before Wilde was convicted of homosexual offenses, and in May of the same year he was sentenced to two years' imprisonment.
His deeply personal The Ballad of Reading Gaol reveals his emotional prison experiences.

CHRONOLOGY of Wilde's Life & Works

1878
At Oxford, he wins a first prize for a poetic composition. He is already notorious for his eccentric behaviour. A disciple to Walter Pater and to the painter J.M. Whistler, he becomes one of the exponents of English Aestheticism, formulating the theory of "Art for Art's Sake". He travels between London and Paris, and in 1879 settles definitely in London. His first literary works, mainly collections of poems, meet with success and are also published in the United States.

1882
Series of conferences in the U.S.A.

1884
Marriage with Constance Lloyd (in the picture), but the two separated shortly after

1888
The Happy Prince, a delicate and intense tale.

1891
The Picture of Dorian Gray, a sort of manifesto of his decadent aestheticism

1891
Lord Arthur Savile 's Crime
Salomé, a drama written in French for Sarah Bernhardt, very successful in France but censured in England.

1892
Lady Windermere's Fan.

1893 A Woman of No Importance.

1895
An Ideal Husband.
The Importance of Being Earnest.
In the same year, accused of being homosexual, he is condemned to two years in Reading Gaol. This experience inspires one of his most expressive works, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, written in 1898, as well as De Profundis, which appeared in 1905. These last works are the sign of a religious conversion or, at least, of a profound development of his sensibility.

1900
Wilde dies in Paris, where he has spent the last years of his life in misery.