Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 and grew up in Dublin, the son of an influential Anglo-Irish family.
He settled in London and became spokesman for the "Art for Art's Sake" school. He was a popular and eccentric dandy, and was famous for his jokes (intelligent and humorous observations) and aphorisms (short sentences that express a general truth).
In 1895 he was arrested and imprisoned for homosexuality, after 2 years he was released and moved to France where he died in poverty in 1900.His literary output ranges from poetry (The Ballad of the Dream of Reading), to essays (The Soul of Man under Socialism), to witty comedies (the most important of which is The Importance of Being Ernest) and his single novel The Portrait of Dorian Gray.The preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray is a manifesto of the aesthetic movement: art is neither moral nor immoral, it has no moral or educational purposes, only beauty in itself is a supreme value.
The split between appearance and reality is at the heart of the novel. The novel tells the story of Dorian Gray who receives a portrait as a gift from his artist friend Basil Hallward. The portrait reflects the beautiful image of Dorian. The portrait is a revelation for Dorian, he realizes that his beauty will not last and he strongly desires to remain young forever as the portrait ages, and for this he would give his soul to the devil. Mysteriously, his wish comes true and he begins a life of dissolution and crime, even killing his friend, who has discovered his secret. In the end Dorian tries to destroy the portrait, but in doing so he kills himself leaving a decadent and old corpse, while the portrait regains its original beauty. The novel was published in 1890, it came as a shock to Victorian readers. He proclaimed that beauty was the sole purpose of art and life, but the book teaches us a moral lesson, Dorian's sins and his hedonistic life led him to its own destruction.
The novel combines the supernatural elements of the Gothic novel with decadent French fiction. The story is told by a discreet third-person narrator and, as in his plays, Wilde uses dialogue to reveal the personalities of his characters. The setting is described in detail. The main symbolic element is the portrait, or Dorian's consciousness and his true self.