Oscar Wilde renewal. He immediately wrote to the Society of Jesus requesting a six-month Catholic retreat; when the request was denied, Wilde wept. "I intend to be received into the Catholic Church before long", Wilde told a journalist who asked about his religious intentions. He spent his last three years impoverished and in exile. He took the name "Sebastian Melmoth", after Saint Sebastian and the titular character of "Melmoth the Wanderer" (a Gothic novel by Charles Maturin, Wilde's great-uncle). Wilde wrote two long letters to the editor of the "Daily Chronicle", describing the brutal conditions of English prisons and advocating penal reform.
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight pen name V. Sirin, and shares with them a preoccupation with the problems of living in exile and of adaptation. This, Nabokov’s first novel under his own name, was published by New Directions Publishers in 1941 and sold slowly. After the success of "Lolita" it was republished in 1959, this time to wide critical acclaim. The narrator, V., is absorbed in the composition of his first literary work, a biography of his half-brother, the Russian-born English novelist, Sebastian Knight (1899–1936). In the course of his quest he tracks down Sebastian's contemporaries at Cambridge and interviews other friends and acquaintances. In