(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)
Introduction by Terry Eagleton
Oscar Wilde has been acknowledged as the wittiest writer in the English language. This collection proves that he was also one of the most versatile. Effortlessly achieved, each revealing a different aspect of his brilliance, all of the plays, prose writings, and poems gathered here support Wilde s belief that entertainment provides the best kind of edification. The works gathered here include Wilde s once-controversial and now classic novel, "The Picture of Dorian Gray," the rioutously (sic) comic plays The Importance...

Written from Wilde's prison cell at Reading Gaol to his friend and lover Lord Alfred Douglas, De Profundis explodes the conventions of the traditional love letter and offers a scathing indictment of Douglas's behavior, a mournful elegy for Wilde's own lost greatness, and an impassioned plea for reconciliation. At once a bracingly honest account of ruinous attachment and a profound meditation on human suffering, De Profundis is a classic of gay literature. Richard Ellmann calls De Profundis "a love letter...One of the greatest, and the longest, ever written."

This...

An innocent's wish, once granted, gives rise to one of literature's most memorable villains in Oscar Wilde's tale of prodigal aestheticism, "The Picture of Dorian Gray." Under the tutelage of Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian is lead into a double life - a surface of eternal youth in prim Victorian society barely concealing an existence of decadence, vice and moral decay. The chilling narrative and Wilde's faerie tale collection, "The Happy Prince" are richly illustrated by Cyrus Rua ("The Grimmest of Grimm.") As an added bonus, this volume also features the original Lippincott's Monthly edition of...

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. Pomona Press are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Jules Amedee Barbey D' Aurevilly (1808-1889) French story-writer and novelist, was the author of. Bewitched (1854), Les Diaboliques (1874), and What Never Dies (1884). After his release from Reading Gaol in 1897, Wilde went to live in France under the alias, Sebastian Melmoth, the name of his favorite martyr from Melmoth: The Wanderer. Under this name he translated What Never Dies."

Oscar Wilde---the famous Irish poet, author, playwright and raconteur---was born in Dublin, October 15, 1856 and died in Paris, November 30, 1900. He wrote The Birthday of the Infanta, Vera, Poems, The Picture of Dorian Gray; The Happy Prince and Other Tales, Guido Ferranti, The Duchess of Padua, Intentions, Essays, Lord Arthur Savile's Crimes and Other Stories, Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, The Importance of Being Earnest; and others.

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - CYRIL (coming in through the open window from the terrace). My dear Vivian, don't coop yourself up all day in the library. It is a perfectly lovely afternoon. The air is exquisite. There is a mist upon the woods, like the purple bloom upon a plum. Let us go and lie on the grass and smoke cigarettes and enjoy Nature. VIVIAN. Enjoy Nature! I am glad to say that I have entirely lost that faculty. People tell us that Art makes us love...

Purchase one of 1st World Library's Classic Books and help support our free internet library of downloadable eBooks. Visit us online at www.1stWorldLibrary.ORG - - Not that I love thy children, whose dull eyes See nothing save their own unlovely woe, Whose minds know nothing, nothing care to know, - But that the roar of thy Democracies, Thy reigns of Terror, thy great Anarchies, Mirror my wildest passions like the sea And give my rage a brother -! Liberty! For this sake only do thy dissonant cries Delight my discreet soul, else might all kings By bloody knout or treacherous cannonades Rob...