Oscar Wilde’s Collected Works: The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, and More! (19 Works): The Classic Drama

by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, and the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death.


This Edition Contains 19 Works;

● Vera or, The Nihilists
● The Duchess of Padua
● The Happy Prince and Other Tales
● The Picture of Dorian Gray
● Intentions
● Lord Arthur Savile's Crime
● A Woman of No Importance
● For Love of the King
● An Ideal Husband
● The Importance of Being Earnest
● The Ballad of Reading Gaol
● The Soul of Man Under Socialism
● De Profundis
● The Canterville Ghost
● A Florentine Tragedy
● Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man
● A House of Pomegranates
● Lady Windermere's Fan
● A Critic in Pall Mall



This Edition Features:
● Biography of Oscar Wilde
● Active Table of Contents
● Well Kindle Formatting

Genres: Fiction

Kindle Edition

Published June 21, 2014

About the author

Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and his criminal conviction for gross indecency for homosexual acts.
Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. In his youth, Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. At university, he read Greats; he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford. He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles.
Wilde tried his hand at various literary activities: he wrote a play, published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on "The English Renaissance" in art and interior decoration, and then returned to London where he lectured on his American travels and wrote reviews for various periodicals. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversational skill, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. At the turn of the 1890s, 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). Wilde returned to drama, writing Salome (1891) in French while in Paris, but it was refused a licence for England due to an absolute prohibition on the portrayal of Biblical subjects on the English stage. Undiscouraged, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late-Victorian London.
At the height of his fame and success, while An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) were still being performed in London, Wilde issued a civil writ against John Sholto Douglas, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel. The Marquess was the father of Wilde's lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The libel hearings unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and criminal prosecution for gross indecency with other males. The jury was unable to reach a verdict and so a retrial was ordered. In the second trial Wilde was convicted and sentenced to two years' hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison he wrote De Profundis (published posthumously in abridged form in 1905), a long letter that discusses his spiritual journey through his trials and is a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On the day of his release, he caught the overnight steamer to France, never to return to Britain or Ireland. In France and Italy, he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.

Reviews

[Valida Karimova]

A selection of writings from the pen of one of the wittiest men who ever lived...

[John Peel]

A select collection of his best-known works, this is an overview of his writings. Some are wonderful - "The Happy Prince", for example; some are cynical and many are simply over-written. The most notable is the famous "The Picture of Dorian Gray", which is a clever idea padded out by lots of Wilde's most noted epigrams. They're funny, but ruin the flow of the story.

[Paige Miller]

queen shit

[Sandra Martinez]

UNA OBRA DE ARTE, amé amé amé amé amé amé

[Heather]

A book containing most of his greatest works; this is a must-have for any fan of classic literature or Oscar Wilde. It contains the most famous The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Canterville Ghost, The Model Millionaire, The Happy Prince and Other Stories, A House of Pomegranates, and The Ballad of Reading Gaol. I love Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray kept my attention. In Dorian Gray, we see the dangers of vanity and putting so much stock into someone else's ideals as your own. Dorian wishes that a portrait that his friend Basil made would grow old and he himself would stay young and handsome and he would never lose the approval of his peers. Well he gets his wish in the most horrific way--the portrait grows more grotesque the more he divulges into a life of immorality. He grows more and more fearful that someone would discover his sins when they look at the portrait.

The other stories are more like short stories, but they are no less amazing. My favorite one would be The Happy Prince. A swallow was migrating to where all his friends went and stopped to sleep under a statue of The Happy Prince. He died and his people immortalized him in a statue adorned with precious jewels. In this story, the swallow speaks with the Happy Prince who is sad at the suffering of his people and reluctantly agrees to help him. I wont spoil the ending but it was one of those endings with a bittersweet ending. Actually most of Oscar's short stories are bittersweet with a Christian ending to them. Oscar Wilde is easily my top favorite author and I recommend him to anyone and everyone.