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A glorious 2020 reprint of the 1995 original exquisitely illustrated biography of the life of Oscar Wilde told through his own private letters, poems, plays, stories and legendary witticisms. It has paintings, engravings and contemporary photographs, cartoons and caricatures of Wilde and his social circle by Aubrey Beardsley, Toulouse-Lautrec, James Whistler and Max Beerbohm to evoke the glittering fin de siècle world and the words of its most fascinating wordsmith and aesthete. The book details Wilde's ruin after the trial and its outcome; the profundity of his writing from prison and exile forms an epitaph not only to his life but the era he carelessly delighted in. The book includes relationships with key artists and writers including John Ruskin, Charles Ricketts and Lillie Langtry. 'The gods have given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, a high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring... I altered the minds of men and the colour of things: there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder...' With exquisite watercolours such as the Wilde family house at a seaside resort near Dublin, lithographs, rare photos such as the grave circles at Mycenae 1870, Punch cartoons and an aerial view of Philadelphia with its grid road system in the 1880s and a New York street scene from when Oscar Wilde was there. Approximately 100 illus., 160 large pages, 25.8 x 19.7cm.