Oscar Wilde was a prominent figure within the late 19th-century Aesthetic Movement, the core ideology of which was fairly simple: art for art’s sake. Wilde was known for his flamboyance and wit, offering an antithesis to the Dickensian tradition. His only novel — The Picture of Dorian Gray — is an encapsulation of both his commitment to the decadence of aesthetics and his literary genius.  
Born on October 16 in 1854, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde is the key to understanding the Irish wit. Wilde came from a noteworthy background: his father, Sir William Wilde, was the leading eye surgeon in Ireland, while his mother, Jane Agnes, was a revolutionary poet writing under the pseudonym Speranza. Moreover, both of Wilde’s parents were invested in preserving the tradition of Irish folklore and culture. Such a remarkable combination was instrumental in Wilde’s upbringing, the magnitude of which did not evade the Irish writer. Following in the intellectual footsteps of his parents, Wilde attended Trinity College and later earned a scholarship at the Magdalen College of Oxford to pursue his study of Classics.
Such an intellectual trajectory was a driving force in the development of Wilde as a writer. His fascination with ancient Greece is profoundly evident in his writing, as well as his private philosophies: his poetry, allusions, critical essays, and sole novel are entrenched in Greek culture. In fact, the 19th-century fervent interest and reinterpretation of Hellenism went beyond Wilde and birthered the counter-cultural Aesthetic Movement that gave rise to the flamboyant nature of the Irishman at hand. 
Wilde wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray was initially published in a magazine in 1890 and finally published as a novel with six additional chapters in 1891. In many ways, it is a reinterpretation of the myth of Narcissus and a product of Wilde’s Aestheticism. The Picture of Dorian Gray was a scandalous work, and though it can easily be interpreted as a cautionary tale, Wilde maintained that there was no such thing as moral or immoral literature — the distinction lay in how well the work was written. Beyond the novel, Wilde penned a number of comedic plays, with The Importance of Being Earnest being perhaps his most well-regarded work as a dramatist. 
 Following an accusation of sodomy from the Marquess of Queensberry — the father of Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s alleged lover — Oscar Wilde was forced to stand trial. After an arduous period of trial and retrial, he was found guilty and sentenced to two years of hard labor in 1895. After his release in 1897, Wilde wrote one final work despite his attempts to reinstate himself as a writer, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). A critique of inhumane prison conditions, it serves as quite the glaring juxtaposition to Wilde’s earlier claims of moral and immoral literature. 
Wilde died soon after in 1900 of acute meningitis. His reputed last words were not devoid of wit or his love for beauty: “This wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. Either it goes or I do.”
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