Recollections of Oscar Wilde

Wilde said his genius was his life. This collection, assembled by Austrian writer Franz Blei in 1906, proves he wasn't wrong. Through the eyes of friends who loved him, we see Wilde not as the martyred icon of literature, but as a dazzling, complex, often desperate man. These are not hagiographies, they're intimate glimpses of someone who could be generous, manipulative, brilliant, and broken. The writers here knew Wilde in the years before his imprisonment, when he was the most famous wit in London, and they knew him after, when exile had dimmed his light but not his sharpness. This is a book for anyone who's ever been seduced by Wilde's paradoxes: the moralist who lived by scandal, the optimist who wrote tragedies, the man who insisted on beauty in a world that punished him for it.