Oscar Wilde

The Writer's Almanac - It's the birthday of Oscar Wilde, (books by this author) born in Dublin (1854). His mother was a famous poet and journalist and Irish nationalist. His father was an ear and eye doctor. Oscar went to college at Oxford where he began to affect an aristocratic accent and began dressing in velvet knee breeches. He stayed in England after college and became part of a movement in art and literature called Aestheticism, whose motto was "Art for art's sake."

Oscar Wilde said, "Even a good sense of color is more important in the development of the individual than a sense of right and wrong."

He went on a big lecture tour of the United States, traveling to Des Moines, Denver, St. Paul, Houston, and Pennsylvania—just to name a few. He returned to London in 1883 and made his reputation in 1891 with his first and only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, about a beautiful young man who remains young while a portrait of him grows old.

And then in the 1890s, Oscar Wilde burst on the British theater scene with four consecutive comedy hits: Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest.

Oscar Wilde said, "There is no such thing as a romantic experience. There are romantic memories, and there is the desire of romance—that is all. I myself would sacrifice everything for a new experience, and I know there is no such thing as a new experience at all. I think I would more readily die for what I do not believe in than for what I hold to be true. I would go to the stake for a sensation and be a skeptic to the last! Only one thing remains infinitely fascinating to me, the mystery of moods. Sometimes I think that the artistic life is a long and lovely suicide, and am not sorry that it is so."