Oscar Wilde – No. 679

Oscar Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London in the early 1890s. Notorious for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and glittering conversation, Wilde was one of the best-known personalities of his day. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, his only novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray), his plays, and the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death.  At the height of his fame and success, while his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), was still on stage in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry (the father of Wilde’s lover) prosecuted for libel. The trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for the “gross indecency” of having had sex with another man. Wilde was ultimately convicted and served a two-year prison sentence with hard labor in England. After his release, he lived the remainder of his life in self-imposed exile in Paris. Wilde was born on this day in 1854. He died destitute in Paris at the age of 46.

I find it interesting that on Wilde’s 1882 trip to San Francisco, the Irishman declared the city “where I belong.” Wilde sometimes mused about relocating to the American West. In October 2012, my wife Heidi and I visited Wilde’s tomb in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris during our trip to Europe. The modernist angel depicted as a relief on his tomb was originally complete with male genitalia that have since been vandalized. In 2011, Wilde’s tomb was cleaned of the many lipstick marks left there by admirers, and a glass barrier was installed to prevent further marks or damage.