The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings

Informationen zum Autor Oscar Wilde Klappentext Flamboyant and controversial, Oscar Wilde was a dazzling personality, a master of wit, and a dramatic genius whose sparkling comedies contain some of the most brilliant dialogue ever written for the English stage. Here in one volume are his immensely popular novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; his last literary work, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a product of his own prison experience; and four complete plays: Lady Windermere's Fan, his first dramatic success, An Ideal Husband, which pokes fun at conventional morality, The Importance of Being Earnest, his finest comedy, and Salomé, a portrait of uncontrollable love originally written in French and faithfully translated by Richard Ellmann. Every selection appears in its entirety-a marvelous collection of outstanding works by the incomparable Oscar Wilde, who's been aptly called "a lord of language” by Max Beerbohm.CHAPTER 1 THE STUDIO was filled with the rich odour of roses, and when the light summer wind stirred amidst the trees of the garden there came through the open door the heavy scent of the lilac, or the most delicate perfume of the pink-flowering thorn. From the corner of the divan of Persian saddlebags on which he was lying, smoking, as was his custom, innumerable cigarettes, Lord Henry Wotton could just catch the gleam of the honey-sweet and honey-coloured blossoms of a laburnum, whose tremulous branches seemed hardly able to bear the burden of a beauty so flamelike as theirs; and now and then the fantastic shadows of birds in flight flitted across the long tussore-silk curtains that were stretched in front of the huge window, producing a kind of momentary Japanese effect, and making him think of those pallid jade-faced painters of Tokio who, through the medium of an art that is necessarily immobile, seek to convey the sense of swiftness and motion. The sullen murmur of the bees shouldering their way through the long unmown grass, or circling with monotonous insistence round the dusty gilt horns of the straggling woodbine, seemed to make the stillness more oppressive. The dim roar of London was like the bourdon note of a distant organ. In the centre of the room, clamped to an upright easel, stood the full-length portrait of a young man of extraordinary personal beauty, and in front of it, some little distance away, was sitting the artist himself, Basil Hallward, whose sudden disappearance some years ago caused, at the time, such public excitement, and gave rise to so many strange conjectures. As the painter looked at the gracious and comely form he had so skilfully mirrored in his art, a smile of pleasure passed across his face, and seemed about to linger there. But he suddenly started up, and, closing his eyes, placed his fingers upon the lids, as though he sought to imprison within his brain some curious dream from which he feared he might awake. "It is your best work, Basil, the best thing you have ever done," said Lord Henry, languidly. "You must certainly send it next year to the Grosvenor. The Academy is too large and too vulgar. Whenever I have gone there, there have been either so many people that I have not been able to see the pictures, which was dreadful, or so many pictures that I have not been able to see the people, which was worse. The Grosvenor is really the only place." "I don't think I shall send it anywhere," he answered, tossing his head back in that odd way that used to make his friends laugh at him at Oxford. "No; I won't send it anywhere." Lord Henry elevated his eyebrows, and looked at him in amazement through the thin blue wreaths of smoke that curled up in such fanciful whorls from his heavy opium-tainted cigarette. "Not send it anywhere? My dear. fellow, why? Have you any reason? What odd chaps you painters are! You do anything in the world to gain a reputation. As soon as you have one, you seem to want to throw i...

About the author

Oscar Wilde was born into a socially prominent Anglo-Irish family in Dublin in 1854. A gifted student, he entered Oxford in 1874, where he fell under the aesthetic influence of Walter Pater and John Ruskin. He was soon well known as a dandy, wit, and man-about-town, but married in 1884. THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY was published in 1891, as was his essay, "The Soul of Man Under Socialism," but he found critical and popular sucess in the theater with his comedies: Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1892) An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). In 1895, the Marquess of Queensberry sought to end the close relationship between his son, Lord Alfred Douglas, and Wilde, publicly referring to Wilde as a homosexual. After losing a lawsuit against the Marquess for libel, Wilde was arrested and served two years of hard labor at Reading and Pentonville prisons. Wilde was deserted by his wife and friends and upon his release in 1897, he moved to France under an assumed name, where he finished writing "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," and traveled to Italy with Lord Alfred Douglas. Wilde died suddenly in Paris in November of 1900.

Product details

• Authors: Oscar Wilde
• Assisted by: Richard Ellmann (Editor)
• Publisher: Bantam Books USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback
• Released: 01.12.1982
• EAN: 9780553212549
• ISBN: 978-0-553-21254-9
• No. of pages: 592
• Dimensions: 107 mm x 175 mm x 23 mm
• Series: Bantam Classics; Bantam Classics
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies