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Irish wit, poet, and dramatist whose reputation rests on his comic masterpieces Lady Windermere\'s Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). He was a spokesman for the late 19th-century https://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0,5716,3932+1+3885,00.htmlAesthetic movement in England, which advocated art for art\'s sake; and he was the object of celebrated civil and criminal suits involving homosexuality and ending in his imprisonment (1895-97).
16. October 1854: Osacr Wilde was born of professional and literary parents. His father, Sir William Wilde, was Ireland\'s leading ear and eye surgeon, who also published books on archaeology, folklore, and the satirist Jonathan Swift; his mother was a revolutionary poet and an authority on Celtic myth and folklore.
26. April 1855: Wilde is baptized in Dublin
1864-1871: Wilde attends the Portora Royal School, in Enniskillen.
1871-1874: He steps into the Trinity College, Dublin. During his time in Dublin he wins a Scholarship for the Magdalen College in Oxford in the height of 95 Pound. In Oxford the college awardes him a degree with honours.
1874-1880: In 1874 and 1877 he travells to Italy two times with John Pentland Mahaffy and William Goulding. During his first stay he also writes the Graffiti d'Italia. But also other things happen during these six years: He distinguishes himself not only as a classical scholar, a poseur, and a wit but also as a poet by winning the coveted Newdigate Prize in 1878 with a long poem, Ravenna; On the 19. April 1876 his father died. He was deeply impressed by the teachings of the English writers John Ruskin and Walter Pater on the central importance of art in life and particularly by the latter\'s stress on the aesthetic intensity by which life should be lived. Like many in his generation, Wilde is determined to follow Pater\'s urging \"to burn always with [a] hard, gemlike flame.\" But Wilde also delightes in affecting an aesthetic pose; this, combined with rooms at Oxford decorated with objets d\'art, resulted in his famous remark: \"Oh, would that I could live up to my blue china!\"
1880-1881: In the summer of 1880, he goes together with his friend Frank Miles to Chelsea. In September his first play for the stage, Vera; or, The Nihilists is published. In this time Aestheticism is the rage and despair of literary London, an Wilde suceeds in establishing himself in social and artistic circles by his wit and flamboyance. Soon the periodical Punch makes him the satiric object of its antagonism to the Aesthetes for what was considered their unmasculine devotion to art; and in their comic opera Patience, Gilbert and Sullivan based the character Bunthorne, a \"fleshly poet,\" partly on Wilde. Wishing to reinforce the association, Wilde publishes, at his own expense, Poems (1881), which echoes, too faithfully, his discipleship to the poets Algernon Swinburne, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and John Keats.
1882: Eager for further acclaim, Wilde agrees to lecture in the United States and Canada in January, announcing on his arrival in New York City that he has \"nothing to declare but his genius.\" Despite widespreas hostility in the press to his languid poses and aesthetic costume of velvet jacket, knee breeches, and black silk stockings, Wilde for 12 months exhortes the Americans to love beauty and art; then returnes to Great Britain to lecture on his impressions of America. In this year he also publishes two new poems, titled Le Jardin and La Mer.
9. July 1883: The verse tragedy The Duchess of Padua appears as private printing in small edition.
29. May 1884: Wilde marries Constance Lloyd, daughter of a prominent Irish barrister; two children, Cyril and Vyvyan, are born, in 1885 and 1886.
1884-1888: Meanwhile, Wilde is a reviewer for the Pall Mall Gazette and then becomes editor of Woman\'s World (1887-89). During this period of apprenticeship as a writer, he publishes The Canterville Ghost (1887) and The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), which reveals his gift for romantic allegory in the form of the fairy tale.
1889: He stops writing for Woman\'s World an publishes Pen, Pencil and Poison, The Decay of Lying, The Birthday of the Little Princess and The Portrait of Mr. W. H.
1890: In the the summer of 1890 Wilde writes and publishes nearly his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (published in Lippincott\'s Magazine, 1890, and in book form, revised and expanded by six chapters, 1891). In this book Wilde combines the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel with the unspeakable sins of French decadent fiction. Critics charged immorality despite Dorian\'s self-destruction; Wilde, however, insisted on the amoral nature of art regardless of an apparently moral ending.
1891: Intentions (1891), consisting of previously published essays, restated his aesthetic attitude toward art by borrowing ideas from the French poets Théophile Gautier and Charles Baudelaire and the American painter James McNeill Whistler. In the same year, two volumes of stories and fairy tales also appeared, testifying to his extraordinary creative inventiveness: Lord Arthur Savile\'s Crime, and Other Stories and A House of Pomegranates. But in this year Wilde met a man, who should become his "fate": Lord Alfred Douglas, the third son of the eight Marquess of Queensbury. A passionate and fatal friendship beginns.
1892: But Wilde\'s greatest successes were his society comedies. Within the conventions of the French \"https://www.britannica.com/bcom/eb/article/2/0,5716,78512+1+76487,00.htmlwell-made play\" (with its social intrigues and artificial devices to resolve conflict), he employes his paradoxical, epigrammatic wit to create a form of comedy new to the 19th-century English theatre. His first success, Lady Windermere\'s Fan, demonstrates that this wit could revitalize the rusty machinery of French drama. In the same year, rehearsals of his macabre play Salomé, written in French and designed, as he said, to make his audience shudder by its depiction of unnatural passion, were halted by the censor because it contained biblical characters. A second society comedy, A Woman of No Importance (written 1892 but produced 1893), convinced the critic William Archer that Wilde\'s plays \"must be taken on the very highest plane of modern English drama.\"
1893: Salome is published, an English translation appeares in 1894 with Aubrey Beardsley\'s celebrated illustrations. He beginns his work on the play An Ideal Husband.
1894: Wilde travels to Paris, where he meets again Lord Alfred Douglas. Together, they travel to Florence. In the autumn he spends a few weeks in Brighton, one more time together with Lord Douglas.
1895: In rapid succession, Wilde\'s final plays, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, were produced in the first minths of 1895. In many of his works, exposure of a secret sin or indiscretion and consequent disgrace is a central design. If life imitated art, as Wilde insisted in his essay The Decay of Lying (1889), he was himself approximating the pattern in his reckless pursuit of pleasure. In addition, his close friendship with Lord Alfred Douglas, infuriated his father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Accused, finally, by the marquess of being a sodomite, Wilde, urged by Douglas, sued for criminal libel. Wilde\'s case collapsed, however, when the evidence went against him, and he dropped the suit. Urged to flee to France by his friends, Wilde refused, unable to believe that his world was at an end. He was arrested and ordered to stand trial. Wilde testified brilliantly, but the jury failed to reach a verdict. In the retrial he was found guilty and sentenced, in May 1895, to two years at hard labour. Most of his sentence was served at Reading Gaol, where he wrote a long letter to Douglas (published in 1905 in a drastically cut version as De Profundis. The complete manuscript was published on the 1. January 1969) filled with recriminations against the younger man for encouraging him in dissipation and distracting him from his work.
1896: This year was one of the worst in the life of Wilde. On the 3. February his mother died. His wife Constance gets awarded the guardianship for Wildes sons. But also the two requests for grace, which had been sent by Wilde to the minister of the interior are rejected.
1897: In May Wilde is released, a bankrupt, and immediately travels to France, hoping to regenerate himself as a writer. His only remaining work, however, was The Ballad of Reading Gaol (published 1898), revealing his concern for inhumane prison conditions. Despite constant money problems he maintaines, as George Bernard Shaw said, \"an unconquerable gaiety of soul\" that sustaines him, and he is visited by such loyal friends as Max Beerbohm and Robert Ross, later his literary executor; he is also reunited with Douglas.
1898-1899: Wilde travels through Europe (Italy, France, Switzerland).
1900: The relationship with Lord Douglas is over. He dies suddenly of acute meningitis brought on by an ear infection. In his semiconscious final moments, he is received into the Roman Catholic church, which he had long admired. He is buried in Paris. The grave sculpture (finished 1912) carries the inscription:
"And alien tears will fill for him / Pity's long broken urn
For his mourners will be outcast men / And outcasts always mourn"
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