Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854 - 1900) was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, and the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death. Wilde's parents were successful Anglo-Irish Dublin intellectuals. Their son became fluent in French and German early in life. At university, Wilde read Greats; he proved himself to be an outstanding classicist, first at Dublin, then at Oxford. He became known for his involvement in the rising philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. After university, Wilde moved to London into fashionable cultural and social circles. As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new "English Renaissance in Art," and then returned to London where he worked prolifically as a journalist. Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversation, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day. In this book: The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, The Picture of Dorian Gray, The Canterville Ghost, The Happy Prince and Other Tales, De Profundis, Lady Windermere's Fan, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Soul of Man under Socialism, Salome, A Woman of No Importance, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and other stories, Selected Prose and The Duchess of Padua"