Oscar Wilde
by Richard Ellmann
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Book Summary Information
Author: Richard EllmannEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 1988-11-05
ISBN: 0394759842
Number of pages: 736
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of Oscar Wilde
Book Review: Gets better with each reading
Summary: 5 Stars
Ellmann's biography of Wilde is just about everything you can hope for: very richly detailed, extremely well written, and practically radiating with a love of the writer and his work. Wilde himself comes alive as a three dimensional figure, not an "icon" (and therefore, two dimensional figure) of any particular literary, social, or political movement. Too many critics have used Wilde for their own purposes and therefore diminished him. Ellmann respects Wilde--and the truth about Wilde--too much, and that integrity sets this book apart.
As a bonus, Wilde's entire literary and social circle come to life, including of course the redoubtable Bosie and the poor choices Wilde made (especially in his foolish litigation against Bosie's father). As a whole, the book does have an emotional wallop, as Wilde's genuine genius pays off with literary success, but like his character Dorian Gray, there was a very unseemly reality beneath the glitter, which brought his career and finally his life to a terribly cruel end.
Summary of Oscar Wilde
The biography sensitive to the tragic pattern of the story of a great subject: Oscar Wilde - psychologically and sexually complicated, enormously quotable, central to a alluring cultural world and someone whose life assumed an unbearably dramatic shape.Richard Ellmann capped an illustrious career in biography (his James Joyce is considered one of the masterpieces of the 20th century) with this life of Oscar Wilde, which won both the National Book Critics Circle Award and Pulitzer Prize on its original publication in 1988. Ellmann's account of Wilde's extravagantly operatic life as poet, playwright, aesthete, and martyr to sexual morality is notable not only for the full portrait it gives of Wilde, but also for Ellmann's assessment of his subject's literary greatness; both aims are served by a plethora of quotations from Wilde's own work and correspondence. Wilde straddled the line between the Victorian age and the modern world as he did everything in life ... with impeccable style.
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