Oscar Wilde hard labour, the maximum penalty, and was jailed from 1895 to 1897. During his last year in prison, he wrote "De Profundis" (published posthumously in 1905), a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure. On his release, he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain. There he wrote his last work, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life. He died destitute in Paris at the age of 46. Oscar Wilde was born at 21
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