Oscar Wilde first hanging at Reading in 18 years. From Wooldridge's hanging, Wilde later wrote "The Ballad of Reading Gaol". Wilde was not, at first, even allowed paper and pen but Haldane eventually succeeded in allowing access to books and writing materials. Wilde requested, among others: the Bible in French; Italian and German grammars; some Ancient Greek texts, Dante's "Divine Comedy", Joris-Karl Huysmans's new French novel about Christian redemption "En Route", and essays by St Augustine, Cardinal Newman and Walter Pater. Between January and March 1897 Wilde wrote a 50,000-word letter to Douglas. He was not allowed to send it, but was
Biographies of Oscar Wilde Frank Harris, Lord Alfred Douglas and Oscar Wilde as to the advisability of Wilde's prosecuting Queensberry can be found in the preface to George Bernard Shaw's play "The Dark Lady of the Sonnets". Frank Harris made his own contribution in a full-length memoir, "Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions" (1916), which is considered very readable but not entirely reliable. In 1954 Vyvyan Holland published his memoir "Son of Oscar Wilde", the story of his education after his father's disgrace and imprisonment. It was revised and updated by Merlin Holland in 1989. André Gide, on whom Wilde had such a strange