Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. His novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and stage comedies Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, established his reputation. In 1895, following his libel action against the Marquess of Queensberry, Wilde was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for homosexual conduct, as a result of which he wrote "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," and his epistolary essay De Profundis. On his release from prison in 1897 he lived in obscurity in Europe, and died in Paris in 1900.