The Irish writer Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Willson Wilde, b. Dublin, 1854, d. 1900 was born in a doctor's family (the father William Wilson and the mother Jane Willson) as one of three children - he had an elder brother William and a younger sister Jane. Jane died at the age of ten from fever, that affected Oscar's works very profoundly (he kept a lock of her hair into envelope, which he had with him until the end of his life). Oscar attended the Protora Royal School at Enniskillen (he took top prizes in Classics and drawing), then the Trinity College in Dublin (here he won the gold medal for a Greek and was awarded a scholarship to Magdalen College in Oxford). His father died in 1876, and the financial situation get worse. Henry Wilson (William's eldest son) financially supported Oscar, his mother Jane and Oscar's brother William. After graduation in Oxford (he was profoundly influenced by Walter Pater and John Ruskin), Oscar moved to London with his friend Frank Miles, a portrait painter. In 1881 Oscar sailed for New York to travel across the United States and to give lectures on the aesthetics. In America he met H. Longfellow, O. W. Holmes and W. Whitman. When he returned from America, he moved to Paris to write a blank – verse tragedy that enjoyed the social life and the prose was refused. He then set off on a lecture tour of Britain and Ireland.

In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd. She was educated, spoke several languages and had an independent mind. They had two sons together. Since 1887 he was working in the magazine The Woman's World. In 1891 he met Lord Alfred Douglas, the third son of the Marquis of Queensbury. They soon became lovers until Wilde's arrest three years later. In 1895 Oscar sued Douglas' father for libel on the charge of homosexuality. Oscar withdrew his case but was himself arrested and convinced of gross indecency and sentenced to two years of hard labor at Reading Gaol. His wife Constance took the children to Switzerland and reverted to an old family of Holland. Oscar briefly returned to his lover Alfred, but the last two years of his life he traveled across the Europe, staying with friends and writing for Parisian newspapers. In 1900 an ear infection and the meningitis caused his death.

The works: Poems, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, The House of Pomegranates, Dorian Gray, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Ballad of Reading Gaol.

Wilde's philosophy was a dandyism taken from Baudelaire. To such familiar propositions as "clothes are the man," "form is content," and "beauty is truth,", "manners before morals."

The Picture of Dorian Gray – it is a novel. Dorian, whose portrait is painted by Basil Hallward, expresses a wish that he might remain young and handsome and that his portrait age instead. His wish is granted: the longer he pursues his life of debauched sensuality, the more foul his portrait becomes, while his appearance remains unchanged. In an attempt to shame Dorian into reform, Hallward persuades him to reveal the portrait, but Dorian kills Hallward when he sees the painter's horrified reaction. Dorian finally tears the canvas with a dagger, but his servants later find the portrait as it originally looked and the body of their master, a diseased rake, lying dead on the floor.