Subscribe to Quotomania on Simplecast or search for Quotomania on your favorite podcast app!

Author, playwright and poet Oscar Wilde was a popular literary figure in late Victorian England. After graduating from Oxford University, he lectured as a poet, art critic and a leading proponent of the principles of aestheticism. In 1891, he published The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel which was panned as immoral by Victorian critics, but is now considered one of his most notable works. As a dramatist, many of Wilde’s plays were well received including his satirical comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his most famous play. Unconventional in his writing and life, Wilde’s affair with a young man led to his arrest on charges of "gross indecency" in 1895. He was imprisoned for two years and died in poverty three years after his release at the age of 46.

From https://www.biography.com/writer/oscar-wilde

For more information about Oscar Wilde:

Previously on The Quarantine Tapes:

Anand Giridharadas on Wilde, at 23:03: https://quarantine-tapes.simplecast.com/episodes/the-quarantine-tapes-063-anand-giridharadas

Lady Windermere’s Fan: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/lady-windermeres-fan-oscar-wilde/1100533269

“Oscar Wilde”: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/oscar-wilde

“How Oscar Wilde Won Over the American Press”: https://lithub.com/how-oscar-wilde-won-over-the-american-press/