Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. In the early 1890s he become one of the most popular playwrights in London. He died from meningitis at age 46.
Wilde learned French and German. At university, Wilde read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new “English Renaissance in Art” and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. He refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into what would be his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). He wrote Salome (1891) in French while in Paris but it was refused a licence for England.
Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
