The Prose of Oscar Wilde first order edition in Cosmopolitan books 1916

Born: October 16, 1854, Westland Row, Dublin, Ireland
Died: November 30, 1900, Paris, France

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in "one of the first celebrity trials", imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.
Wilde's prose is distinguished by its extraordinary ease and clarity, and by the absence—very singular in his case—of the preciosity which he admired too much in other writers, and advocated with over-emphasis. order Perhaps that is why many of his stories and essays and plays are used as English text-books in Russian and Scandinavian and Hungarian schools. Artifice and affectation, often assumed to be recurrent defects in his writings by those unacquainted with them, are comparatively rare. Wilde once boasted in an interview that only Flaubert, Pater, Keats, and Maeterlinck had influenced him, and then added in a characteristic way: “But I had already gone more than half-way to meet them.” Anyone curious as to the origin of Wilde's style and development should consult the learned treatise of Dr. Ernst Bendz, whose comprehensive treatment of the subject renders any elucidation of mine superfluous; while nothing can be added to Mr. Holbrook Jackson's masterly criticism of Wilde and his position in literature. Wilde is more various than almost any author of the last century, though the act of writing was always a burden to him. Some critic acutely pointed out that poetry and prose were almost side-issues for him. The resulting faults and weakness of what he left are obvious. Except in the plays he has no sustained scheme of thought.

This book is definitely an Antique collectible first edition with Cosmopolitan .the original paper warp is still there in a used condition , but the book itself looks as new in spite of its 115 years. The quality of the binding and the condition of the book are perfect , there is still a silk page marker . The book has 706 pages, fascinating book approaching so many subjects ...a book to keep in your private library.