How Oscar Became Wilde - and Other Literary Lives You Never Learned about in School

How Oscar Became Wilde - and Other Literary Lives You Never Learned about in School PDF Author: Elliot Engel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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How Oscar Became Wilde - and Other Literary Lives You Never Learned about in School

How Oscar Became Wilde - and Other Literary Lives You Never Learned about in School PDF Author: Elliot Engel
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Authors, English
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


Making Oscar Wilde

Making Oscar Wilde PDF Author: Michèle Mendelssohn
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198802366
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
Packed with new evidence, "Making Oscar Wilde" tells the untold story of a local Irish eccentric who became a global cultural icon. This must-read book dramatizes Oscar Wilde's remarkable rise in Victorian England and post-Civil War America. Michele Mendelssohn interweaves biography and social history to reveal a life like no other.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde PDF Author: Matthew Sturgis
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0525656375
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 864

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Book Description
The fullest, most textural, most accurate—most human—account of Oscar Wilde's unique and dazzling life—based on extensive new research and newly discovered materials, from Wilde's personal letters and transcripts of his first trial to newly uncovered papers of his early romantic (and dangerous) escapades and the two-year prison term that shattered his soul and his life. "Simply the best modern biography of Wilde." —Evening Standard Drawing on material that has come to light in the past thirty years, including newly discovered letters, documents, first draft notebooks, and the full transcript of the libel trial, Matthew Sturgis meticulously portrays the key events and influences that shaped Oscar Wilde's life, returning the man "to his times, and to the facts," giving us Wilde's own experience as he experienced it. Here, fully and richly portrayed, is Wilde's Irish childhood; a dreamy, aloof boy; a stellar classicist at boarding school; a born entertainer with a talent for comedy and a need for an audience; his years at Oxford, a brilliant undergraduate punctuated by his reckless disregard for authority . . . his arrival in London, in 1878, "already noticeable everywhere" . . . his ten-year marriage to Constance Lloyd, the father of two boys; Constance unwittingly welcoming young men into the household who became Oscar's lovers, and dying in exile at the age of thirty-nine . . . Wilde's development as a playwright. . . becoming the high priest of the aesthetic movement; his successes . . . his celebrity. . . and in later years, his irresistible pull toward another—double—life, in flagrant defiance and disregard of England's strict sodomy laws ("the blackmailer's charter"); the tragic story of his fall that sent him to prison for two years at hard labor, destroying his life and shattering his soul.

Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity

Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity PDF Author: David M. Friedman
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393245918
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
The story of Oscar Wilde’s landmark 1882 American tour explains how this quotable literary eminence became famous for being famous. On January 3, 1882, Oscar Wilde, a twenty-seven-year-old “genius”—at least by his own reckoning—arrived in New York. The Dublin-born Oxford man had made such a spectacle of himself in London with his eccentric fashion sense, acerbic wit, and extravagant passion for art and home design that Gilbert & Sullivan wrote an operetta lampooning him. He was hired to go to America to promote that work by presenting lectures on interior decorating. But Wilde had his own business plan. He would go to promote himself. And he did, traveling some 15,000 miles and visiting 150 American cities as he created a template for fame creation that still works today. Though Wilde was only the author of a self-published book of poems and an unproduced play, he presented himself as a “star,” taking the stage in satin breeches and a velvet coat with lace trim as he sang the praises of sconces and embroidered pillows—and himself. What Wilde so presciently understood is that fame could launch a career as well as cap one. David M. Friedman’s lively and often hilarious narrative whisks us across nineteenth-century America, from the mansions of Gilded Age Manhattan to roller-skating rinks in Indiana, from an opium den in San Francisco to the bottom of the Matchless silver mine in Colorado—then the richest on earth—where Wilde dined with twelve gobsmacked miners, later describing their feast to his friends in London as “First course: whiskey. Second course: whiskey. Third course: whiskey.” But, as Friedman shows, Wilde was no mere clown; he was a strategist. From his antics in London to his manipulation of the media—Wilde gave 100 interviews in America, more than anyone else in the world in 1882—he designed every move to increase his renown. There had been famous people before him, but Wilde was the first to become famous for being famous. Wilde in America is an enchanting tale of travel and transformation, comedy and capitalism—an unforgettable story that teaches us about our present as well as our past.

Built of Books

Built of Books PDF Author: Thomas Wright
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 142993509X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
An entirely new kind of biography, Built of Books explores the mind and personality of Oscar Wilde through his taste in books This intimate account of Oscar Wilde's life and writings is richer, livelier, and more personal than any book available about the brilliant writer, revealing a man who built himself out of books. His library was his reality, the source of so much that was vital to his life. A reader first, his readerly encounters, out of all of life's pursuits, are seen to be as significant as his most important relationships with friends, family, or lovers. Wilde's library, which Thomas Wright spent twenty years reading, provides the intellectual (and emotional) climate at the core of this deeply engaging portrait. One of the book's happiest surprises is the story of the author's adventure reading Wilde's library. Reminiscent of Jorge Luis Borges's fictional hero who enters Cervantes's mind by saturating himself in the culture of sixteenth-century Spain, Wright employs Wilde as his own Virgilian guide to world literature. We come to understand how reading can be an extremely sensual experience, producing a physical as well as a spiritual delight.

Oscar's Ghost

Oscar's Ghost PDF Author: Laura Lee
Publisher: Amberley Publishing Limited
ISBN: 1445662590
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 725

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Book Description
The dramatic story of the legal and emotional battle that raged between two of Oscar Wilde's closest friends – both former lovers – following the playwright's death

How Oscar Became Wilde?

How Oscar Became Wilde? PDF Author: Elliot Engel
Publisher: Robson
ISBN: 9781861058232
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
They are the icons of the literary world whose soaring works have been discussed and analysed in countless classrooms, homes and pubs. Yet for most readers, the living, breathing human beings behind the classics have remained unknown... until now! These concise and readable biographical profiles, anecdotes and behind-the-scenes tales will reveal why Sir Arthur Conan Doyle blamed his wife's death on Sherlock Holmes, how Charles Dickens’s pet launched Edgar Allan Poe on his way to literary immortality and the strange connection between Jane Austen and Ernest Hemingway. Chaucer, the Brontës, Wilde, Hardy and Lawrence, you’ll never look at these literary giants in the same way again.

The Invention of Oscar Wilde

The Invention of Oscar Wilde PDF Author: Nicholas Frankel
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 1789144221
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
“One should either wear a work of art, or be a work of art,” Oscar Wilde once declared. In The Invention of Oscar Wilde, Nicholas Frankel explores Wilde’s self-creation as a “work of art” and a carefully constructed cultural icon. Frankel takes readers on a journey through Wilde’s inventive, provocative life, from his Irish origins—and their public erasure—through his challenges to traditional concepts of masculinity and male sexuality, his marriage and his affairs with young men, including his great love Lord Alfred Douglas, to his criminal conviction and final years of exile in France. Along the way, Frankel takes a deep look at Wilde’s writings, paradoxical wit, and intellectual convictions.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde PDF Author: Richard Ellmann
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0804151121
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 737

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Book Description
Winner of both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Oscar Wilde is the definitive biography of the tortured poet and playwright and the last book by renowned biographer and literary critic Richard Ellmann. Ellmann dedicated two decades to the research and writing of this biography, resulting in a complex and richly detailed portrait of Oscar Wilde. Ellman captures the wit, creativity, and charm of the psychologically and sexually complicated writer, as well as the darker aspects of his personality and life. Covering everything from Wilde's rise as a young literary talent to his eventual imprisonment and death in exile with exquisite detail, Ellmann's fascinating account of Wilde's life and work is a resounding triumph.

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde PDF Author: Oscar Wilde
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description