Born in 1854 Dublin to a pair of writers — a father who was a well-known surgeon but also published works on architecture and Irish folklore, and a mother who wrote poetry under a pseudonym — Oscar Wilde went on to himself become an acclaimed poet, playwright and novelist, though his tragic fate overshadowed his literary and artistic success for decades. His most famous works include the poems "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" and "The Sphinx"; the plays The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere's Fan; and a singular novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray. Today, Wilde is acknowledged as a queer icon, and valorized by students of British (and more specifically, Irish) literature, and the global LGBTQ+ community.
Wilde attended Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he became involved in the aesthetic movement, which sought to escape the materialism of the Industrial Age by creating beautiful "art for art's sake." The corpus of Wilde's work is ...