Alas, he is long dead. Helpfully, he wrote a lot of the good stuff down.
On this day in 1854, in Dublin, Ireland, a baby was born. It was named Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde.
Pictured here is a different baby, but no matter.
Within 46 years, that baby had become a man, suffered, made literature, and died.
He wrote many poems, essays, letters, and stories.
In The Soul of Man Under Socialism, he wrote, “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
Napoleon Sarony
He seems to have spent a lot of time lounging around and thinking things over.
"I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning and took out a comma," he once said. "In the afternoon — well, I put it back again."
But don't get the wrong idea: as a writer he was very productive. The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, a hefty paperback, is 1,216 pages long.
Library of Congress
He was brilliant and hilarious.
In The Critic As Artist, he wrote, “A little sincerity is a dangerous thing, and a great deal of it is absolutely fatal.”
This is a sculpture of him in Dublin's Archbishop Ryan Park.
