Life of Oscar Wilde

Robert Sherard spent twenty years in Oscar Wilde's orbit, and this biography emerges from that singular intimacy. He watched Wilde ascend to the pinnacle of London society, where his wit dazzled and his plays redefined Victorian theatre. He was present for the ruinous trial that destroyed everything, and he witnessed the exile and death that followed. Sherard does not pretend to objectivity; he writes as someone who loved Wilde and was shattered by what the world did to him. The result is a biography that captures the living voice, the electric conversation, the generosity and self-destructiveness that no distant historian can reconstruct. This is Wilde as his friends knew him: brilliant, reckless, and ultimately destroyed by the age that celebrated him.