Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde wrote The Importance of Being Earnest in three weeks in 1894. He wrote it at full speed, as a comedy, in a rented house in Worthing, while at the height of his fame — and produced what is widely considered the finest comedy of manners in the English language. The play opened in London in February 1895. On February 18, 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry left a calling card at Wilde's club calling him a posing sodomite. Wilde sued for libel. Within six months his career, his marriage, his financial security, and his freedom were gone.

• Born: October 16, 1854, Dublin, Ireland
• Died: November 30, 1900, Paris, France (age 46, cerebral meningitis)
• Era: Victorian; Aesthetic movement; literary decadence
• Major works: The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), An Ideal Husband (1895), De Profundis (written 1897, published posthumously), The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898)

He was born in Dublin, educated at Trinity College and then Oxford, where he graduated with a double first and won the Newdigate Prize for poetry. He arrived in London in the late 1870s already convinced of his own brilliance, and spent the next decade earning the right to that conviction. He became the most talked-about literary figure in England. His wit was so precise and so fast that people repeated his lines immediately, as they were being delivered, and he had to keep producing new ones to stay ahead of his own reputation.

The libel suit against Queensberry collapsed when Wilde's relationship with Queensberry's son Lord Alfred Douglas was exposed in court. Wilde was subsequently charged with gross indecency, convicted, and sentenced to two years of hard labor at Reading Gaol. The experience destroyed his health. He emerged in 1897, went to France, and never returned to England. He died in Paris in 1900 at forty-six.

What he wrote in Reading Gaol — the long letter to Douglas published as De Profundis, and the poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol — are different in register from the comedies and the epigrams. They are the work of a man who had lost everything and was still looking clearly at the world. The wit survived the prison. The clarity deepened.

His words have outlasted the laws that destroyed him, the society that applauded his destruction, and the century that mostly preferred to remember the wit and forget the cost. Both deserve to be carried.