OSCAR WILDE was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, poet, and prominent aestheticist born October 16th, 1854 and passed away a destitute November 30th, 1900 from cerebral meningnitis. He was educated at Trinity College in Dublin and subsequently at Magdalen College of the University of Oxford.

The Picture of Dorian Gray, his first and only novel, was first published in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, and gained Wilde much of his notoriety. His pursuit for aesthetic detail led him to write his first play Salomé (published 1891), which was written in French and prohibited from lisensing in England due to prohibitions of Biblical subjects on the English stage.

His most notable work, The Importance of Being Earnest, was first performed on February 14th, 1895. However, this work also signified the start of his downfall, as he had the Marquess of Queensbery (mother of his lover, Lord Alfred Douglas) prosecuted for libel. However, the trial uncovered evidence of his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas which led to his own arrest and trial for "gross indecency", a law generally used to prosecute homosexual men, and was imprisoned for two years of hard labour in 1895.

In prison, he wrote De Profundis (published 1905), a long letter written to Lord Alfred Douglas discussing his spritual journeys through his trials and afterwards he moved to France, where he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (published 1897), a long poem on the harshness of life in prison.