The Picture Of Dorian Gray

Enamoured by the beauty of Dorian Gray, the sensitive artist Basil Hallward paints in oil a full-length portrait of the protagonist. Sitting there Gray listens to the hedonistic worldviews of Hallward s friend Lord Henry Wotton and wants to stay young forever to pursue his epicurean ideals. He wishes his portrait to age instead of himself. Later. when he dumps his actress friend Sybil Vane, Gray notices a change of expression in his portrait. He knows that his wish has been granted. Now nothing will keep him from leading the life of a libertine.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a tour de force in which Wilde intricately explores the idea of "art for art s sake." Published in 1890, it is his only novel and arguably his best work.

Author Description:
Oscar Fingal O Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He went to Trinity College, Dublin and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to propagandize the new Aesthetic (or Art for Art s Sake ) Movement.
Despite winning a first and the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde failed to obtain an Oxford scholarship, and was forced to earn a living by lecturing and writing for periodicals. After his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with little initial success. However, his three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince (1888), Lord Arthur Savile s Crime (1891) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), gradually won him a reputation as a modern writer with an original talent, a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his Society Comedies - Lady Windermere s Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895.
Success, however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen extravagantly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas s father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two years imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.

Format: Paperback