(used an old paper)
The Astounding Life of Oscar Wilde
Author Oscar Wilde was mostly recognized for this works and personal life. Wilde was very successful during his early life. He had accomplished great things. He had many acclaimed works, but the most famous was The Importance of Being Earnest. Although he ran into a few challenges within his personal life, suffering imprisonment, he overcame his problems. Ending his legacy in death, Wilde is still remembered as of today for all of his great works.
Oscar Wilde was born Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. He was born on October 16, 1854 in Dublin, Ireland to his father, William Wilde and his mother, Jane Francesca Elgee. His parents were very successful, so they expected their son to be just as victorious as they were. In his early life, Wilde won the school's prize for the top classics student in each of his last two years, as well as second prize in drawing during his final year. Graduating in 1871, Wilde was awarded the Royal School Scholarship to attend Trinity College in Dublin.
At the end of his first year at Trinity, in 1872, he placed first in the school's classics examination and received the college's Foundation Scholarship, the highest honor awarded to undergraduates. Following his graduation in 1874, Wilde received the Berkeley Gold Medal as Trinity's best student in Greek, as well as the Demyship scholarship for further study at Magdalen College in Oxford. While there, Wilde continued to stand out academically. It was also at Oxford that Wilde made his first lasting attempts at creative writing. Upon graduating from Oxford, Wilde moved to London to live with his friend, Frank Miles. There, he continued to focus on writing poetry, publishing his first collection, Poems, in 1881. While the book received only modest critical praise, it yet established Wilde as an up-and-coming writer.
His highly praised works began in 1888, while he was still serving as editor of Lady's World; Wilde entered a seven-year period of enraged creativity. During the time, he produced nearly all of his great literary works. Seven years after he wrote Poems in the year of 1888, Wilde published The Happy Prince and Other Tales, a collection of children's stories. Wilde's first play, Lady Windermere's Fan, opened in February 1892 to widespread popularity and critical acclaim, encouraging Wilde to adopt playwriting as his primary literary form. Over the next few years, Wilde produced several great plays—witty, highly satirical comedies of manners that nevertheless contained dark and serious undertones. His most notable plays were A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), his most famous play.
Around the time that Wilde was enjoying his literary success, Wilde added to his personal life by taking on a prison sentence. He began an affair with a young man named Lord Alfred Douglas. On February 18, 1895, Douglas's father was informed of the affair, left a calling card at Wilde's home addressed to "Oscar Wilde: Posing Somdomite," a misspelling of sodomite. Although Wilde's homosexuality was something of an open secret, he was so outraged by Douglas’s father’s note that he sued him for libel. The decision ruined his life.
When the trial began in March, evidence was presented of Wilde's homosexuality by passages from his literary works, as well as his written love letters to Douglas. When the evidence was provided, it resulted in the release of Wilde's libel case and his arrest on charges of "gross indecency." Wilde was tried on these charges and gave this emotional defense: " The Love that dare not speak its name' in this country is such a great affection of an elder for a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of his philosophy, and such as you find in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare. It is that deep, spiritual affection that is as pure as it is perfect . . . It is
