It’s the birthday of several renowned playwrights, including Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), best known for his one novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and the plays Lady Windermere’s Fan (1891), The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), and An Ideal Husband (also 1895). He was also a proponent of the Aesthetic Movement, which espoused “art for art’s sake,” for Pete’s sake. (Nothing against the Aesthetics. Just wanted to say that.)

Wilde was born Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde, which seems like plenty. He was born in Dublin; his father was a highly successful ear and eye surgeon (before it was discovered that ear-nose-throat was a thing). His mother was a poet and a “literary hostess.” Wilde studied at Trinity College, Dublin, and then Magdalen College, Oxford, where he did very well in the Classics and also won the Newdigate Prize in 1878 for his poem “Ravenna.” (The Newdigate was founded in 1805 by Sir Roger—wait for it—Newdigate and is still given out annually at Oxford for the best student poem, although I see they didn’t give one out this year; perhaps they’re trying to emulate the Nobel?) Wilde was also becoming known as a Terribly Witty Person, and to those annoyed by Aestheticism he was a Somewhat Annoying Person. In the tradition of so many witty and annoying people before him, he moved to London to become a writer.

In 1881 Wilde self-published his beautifully entitled collection, Poems. In 1882 he embarked on a year-long lecture tour in the U.S. and Canada, where the media was annoyed by his affectations and velvet pants, but the experience was invigorating and formative for Wilde. He then returned to England and lectured on America. (Wilde: “America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilisation in between.”) In 1884 he married the daughter of an Irish barrister and they had two children in quick succession. He published a book of fairy tales, The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), and began to come into his own in the 1890s with Dorian Gray and his succession of brilliant and “wilde-ly” popular comic plays. (That was terrible. I’m so sorry. Not sorry enough to remove it, but really fairly contrite.)

In 1891, Wilde began an affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, whose father, the Marquess of Queensberry, said, “We’ll have none of that,” and called Wilde a sodomite. Wilde responded by suing the Marquess for libel in 1895 but lost, after which he himself was tried for gross indecency and sentenced to two years hard labor. (Okay, that sounds horrifying.) By the time he got out in 1897, his health, finance, and reputation were in ruins—yet “he maintained, as George Bernard Shaw said, ‘an unconquerable gaiety of soul that sustained him’” (britannica.com/biography/Oscar-Wilde). Wilde moved to France, where he published his final work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), which is where he had served his sentence. In November, 1900, he developed an ear infection that led to acute meningitis and died at the age of 46. (Ack! Ear infections can do that? I urge everyone to see a doctor today, and I mean a real ear-nose-throat specialist, none of these eye and ear charlatans.)

I wish I could tell you that Wilde’s last words were, “Either this wallpaper goes, or I do,” but sadly that story is apocryphal. He did say those words, but several weeks before his death. Wilde’s actual last words were evidently a Catholic prayer, as he converted to Catholicism in his final moments.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/Oscar-wilde-quotes-about-america/

Seriously: have a doctor look at your ears today and stay scrupulously honest to the data.