THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Willis Wilde (1854–1900) was the son of Sir William Wilde, a noted Dublin eye specialist, and Jane Francesca, Lady Wilde, a well-known Irish poet and journalist. He was a brilliant student at Trinity College, Dublin, and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize in 1878 for his poem Ravenna. He married his wife Constance in 1884 and they had two sons. Wilde’s most prolific period was between 1888 and 1895. Following an ill-advised lawsuit against Lord Alfred Douglas’s father, the Marquess of Queensberry, for libel, Wilde was prosecuted for homosexual acts and imprisoned for two years with hard labor in Reading Gaol. He died in Paris in 1900.