Oscar Wilde was the wittiest man in London — and it destroyed him. His aphorisms are quoted to this day. In 1895 he was tried for "gross indecency" and sentenced to two years' hard labor.
He was born in Dublin in 1854. Oxford, aestheticism, the cult of beauty. He arrived in London and conquered its drawing rooms, its theatres, its editorial offices. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890): beauty without morality leads to ruin.
Lady Windermere's Fan, Salome, The Importance of Being Earnest — plays still staged today. The Ballad of Reading Gaol was written after his two years in prison.
He came out of prison a broken man. He left for France under the name Sebastian Melmoth, and died in Paris in 1900. "I am dying beyond my means," he is said to have remarked.