His emerald shadow looms large in David Skal’s lavishly illustrated Something in the Blood, the Man Who Wrote Dracula. These books about Wilde just kept coming. This literary detective work reconstitutes Wilde’s personal library, sold en masse after his trial, Built of Books is a masterwork that unpacks the books that fueled Wilde’s extraordinary imagination and criticism. Next, I read Thomas Wright’s Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde, published in 2010. Suddenly, I couldn’t get enough Oscar Wilde. Instead, I found a meditative, fully fleshed out life ripe for reconsideration, one informed by familial tragedy, deep research, and unexpected insights. Infamous Lord Alfred Douglas, still upstaging Oscar with the most singular and gay line ever immortalized in poetry: “The love that dare not speak its name.” I’d expected a quick read, the prerequisite condemnations, and some salacious gossip. Bosie had been on my shelves for one decade, packed and unpacked across two boroughs and three apartments.

It was for this reason and this reason alone that I devoured Douglas Murray’s Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas(2000) about Oscar Wilde’s historically problematic twink. The books I was then compelled to consider were a predictably weird lot–a direct reflection of my taste in general plus related ephemera. This unprecedented adventure was primarily an economic one: at the time I spent an inordinate amount of my income on books and assorted media and felt that specific cuts would help reign in what had started out as a passion but had slipped into an obsession. In 2015, I embarked upon the single bravest journey any avid reader can undertake: I publically forsook buying books for an entire year so that I might dedicate myself to reducing the teetering unread stacks I had purchased in the preceding decades. “A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” –Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde is Still Alive! The Best Books About Oscar Wilde

Oscar wilde by richard ellmann