Biographies of Oscar Wilde

Lord Alfred Douglas wrote two books about his relationship with Wilde: Oscar Wilde and Myself (1914), largely ghost-written by T.W.H. Crosland, vindictively reacted to Douglas's discovery that De Profundis was addressed to him and defensively tried to distance him from Wilde's scandalous reputation. Both authors later regretted their work.^[1] Later, in Oscar Wilde: A Summing Up (1940) and his Autobiography he was more sympathetic to Wilde. An account of the argument between 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.^[2] 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 effect, wrote, In Memoriam, Oscar Wilde; Wilde also features in his journals.^[3] Thomas Louis, who had earlier translated books on Wilde into French, produced his own L'esprit d'Oscar Wilde in 1920.^[4]

In 1962, Wilde's letters were first published, edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. Merlin Holland revised it and included new discoveries in The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde (Merlin Holland & Rupert Hart-Davis. (2000). Henry Holt and Company LLC, New York. ISBN 0-8050-5915-6). In 1997 Merlin Holland published The Wilde Album. This small volume of pictures, images, and other Wilde memorabilia, drew on previously unpublished archives. It includes all 27 portraits taken by Napoleon Sarony in New York in 1882. In 2003 Merlin Holland edited the uncensored transcripts of Wilde's trials for publication. The book contained a 50-page introduction by Merlin Holland, and a foreword by John Mortimer QC. It was published as Irish Peacock and Scarlett Marquess: The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde in the UK, and as simply The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde in some other countries.

• In 1946 Hesketh Pearson published The Life of Oscar Wilde (Methuen), containing materials derived from conversations with Bernard Shaw, George Alexander, Herbert Beerbohm Tree and many others who had known or worked with Wilde.
• In 1987 the literary biographer Richard Ellmann published his detailed work Oscar Wilde, for which he posthumously won a National (USA) Book Critics Circle Award in 1988^[5] and a Pulitzer Prize in 1989.^[6] It is considered by some to be the definitive work on the subject.^[7] Ray Monk, a philosopher and biographer, described Ellmann's Oscar Wilde as a "rich, fascinating biography that succeeds in understanding another person".^[8] However, it has gained the reputation among Wilde scholars of being very fallible on points of fact. Paul Chipchase wrote that "It would be dangerous to rely on any single statement of Professor Ellmann without examining the sources for it", and Horst Schroeder that "his most elementary facts, attributions and quotations...were more often than not wrong".^[9] The book was the basis for the 1997 film Wilde, directed by Brian Gilbert.^[10]
• In 1994 Melissa Knox published her "psycho-biography" Oscar Wilde: A Long and Lovely Suicide. This book explores the ways in which Wilde's literary styles and the events of his life developed in response to his desires, conflicts and suffering. It offers new information as well as new insights into Wilde as an artist.
• 1999 saw the publication of Oscar Wilde on Stage and Screen by Robert Tanitch. This book is a comprehensive record of Wilde's life and work as presented on stage and screen from 1880 until 1999. It includes cast lists and snippets of reviews.
• In 2000 Barbara Belford, a professor at Columbia University, published Oscar Wilde: A Certain Genius.
• 2000 also saw the publication of The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde by Joseph Pearce. It explores the religious sensibility in his art, his interior suffering and dissatisfaction, his lifelong fascination with Catholicism despite his Protestant upbringing, and his reception into the Catholic Church on his deathbed.
• In 2003 Century/Random house published The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde by Neil McKenna, billed as the "first complete account of Wilde's sexual and emotional life".^{[citation needed]} It is often speculative, and it has been widely criticised for its lack of scholarly rigour and its pure conjectures.^[11][12]
• In 2008 Chatto & Windus published Thomas Wright's Oscar's Books, a biography of Wilde the reader, which explores all aspects of his reading from his childhood in Dublin to his death in Paris. Wright tracked down many books that formerly belonged in Wilde's Tite Street Library, which was dispersed at the time of his trials; these contain Wilde's marginal notes, which no scholar had previously examined. The book was published as a Vintage paperback in September 2009. It was published in the USA, also in 2009, as Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde.
• In 2014 David M. Friedman published Wilde in America, the central core of which discusses Oscar's tour of the United States, but also provides an account of his life, especially his early education and rise to fame.
• In 2018 Head of Zeus Ltd in London published Matthew Sturgis's Oscar: A Life.

In 1912 Arthur Ransome published Oscar Wilde, a critical study, a literary study of Wilde. This briefly mentioned Wilde's life, but resulted in Ransome (and The Times Book Club) being sued for libel by Lord Alfred Douglas; a trial in April 1913 which in a way was a re-run of the trial(s) of Oscar Wilde. The trial resulted from Douglas's rivalry with Robbie Ross for Wilde (and his need for money). Douglas lost; De Profundis, which was read in part at the trial, disproved his claims.^[13]

• In 1955 Sewell Stokes wrote a novel, Beyond His Means, based on the life of Oscar Wilde.
• In 1983 Peter Ackroyd published The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde, a novel in the form of a pretended memoir.
• In 1990 Russell A.Brown published Sherlock Holmes and the Mysterious Friend of Oscar Wilde in which the writer consults the great detective.
• In 1991, cartoonist Dave Sim published Melmoth, a partially fictionalised account of Oscar Wilde's last days, as a part of his graphic epic Cerebus.
• In 1987, Robert Reilly wrote and published The God of Mirrors, a novel based on the facts of Wilde's "dazzling life and tragic fate."