This story is totally great.

A gifted, creative mind that knew no bounds. What a tortured life! Ellmann leaves out no detail (as he did with his definitive bio on James Joyce). This “last word” on Wilde won a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Critics’ Circle Award. Deservedly so. Exhausting read, however. 4.5 Stars.

A rather odd inscription on the title page:

"9/19/94
To Bill,
This is the
Pulitzer Prize
winning book
on which Robert
worked.

With warmest
best wishes
Sheila & Bill
Ellmann"

A Robert Ellmann is noted on the acknowledgement page. Is anyone familiar with the Ellmann family?

I am glad I read this, but I do not think it is for everyone. If you have a specific interest in Oscar or art history/philosophy, read it. It is dense and full of academic details and footnotes. I don’t think the casual reader would enjoy it as much as a student of the subjects.

I object to the ending. It was too sad. Why did he have to die?

But in all seriousness, the final lines of this book did make me cry. Here: "His work survived as he claimed it would. We inherit his struggle to achieve supreme fictions in art, to associate art with social change, to bring together individual and social impulse, to save what is eccentric and singular from being sanitized and standardized, to replace a morality of severity by one of sympathy. He belongs to our world more than to Victoria's. Now, beyond the reach of scandal, his best writings validated by time, he comes before us still, a towering figure, laughing and weeping, with parables and paradoxes, so generous, so amusing, and so right."

I could never give this 5 stars merely for some differences of opinion between Ellmann and I and the few errors I know this book contains, but it was still thoroughly enjoyable. It even made me laugh at times, which is a feat (perhaps more due to Wilde than Ellmann, but sometimes it was definitely Ellmann). I was never too bored, though the duller sections were usually the parts about people who were not Wilde. This is the first time I've ever read nonfiction of this length, let alone a biography of this length. I've been reading it for so long that I feel sad and sort of lonely at the idea of giving it up. It was my travel companion in the UK, and a long-time presence on my nightstand. Still, I'm also sort of relieved to be finally finished. I think I'll take a break from Oscar for a while, before continuing to read through my collection of bookish Wildeana. I need to go back to primary sources soon though--I've been reading about him for too long.

Over thirty years and still THE definitive biography of the frustrating and controversial genius.

Richard Ellman's fascinating biography follows Wilde from his beginnings as a brilliant student to his tragic end, when he haunted European locales that had delighted him in better times like a living ghost. The early part of the book is the least interesting. Wilde was one of the first useless celebrities-figures who gain notoriety simply because something odd or appealing about them keeps them in the public eye apart from any actual talent (although Wilde was, by all accounts, an excellent speaker). Ellman's analysis of Wilde's aestheticism is, I suppose, essential to a complete understanding of the man, but since the matters that Wilde devoted so much of his energy to were so frivolous and trivial, it doesn't make for a very good read. Later, though, Wilde demonstrates his talent with the publication of "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and his successful plays, and the biography picks up as well. Wilde becomes a truly tragic figure by the end, ruined by his love for Lord Alfred Douglas, hounded by Douglas's father the Marquis of Queensberry, imprisoned, and finally betrayed and forgotten by most of his former friends. For all his wit and insight, Wilde emerges as a curiously naïve character and basically a good man, kind and trusting to a fault.

Unlike most biographies this one is a bit too detailed. Chock full of little instances this is for those who want to know everything knowable plus.

The unreadable in pursuit of the dislikeable.
Turgid prose that doesn't know when to stop, at times awkward construction, and far too little about the effect this ghastly man had on his wife and children. One has to feel sorry for OW but if ever a man was author of his own downfall, he was the man. I know things now about the late nineteenth century that I wish I didn't. In fact, I wish I hadn't read this book at all.

A very fine piece of literary biography. Ellmann writes Wilde’s life as a tragedy, with regular presaging of the events of his downfall from the very beginning of the book. Despite his flaws, I find Wilde a compelling and attractive figure of the nineteenth century. The urbanity of this book does him justice.

3 3/4 stars

Amazingly well researched and carefully written, this is the definitive biography for all fans of Wilde, but also for everybody interested in a period in time where major changes were happening. Cases like Wilde's surely helped to spring forward the openess and freedom that characterized the Roaring Twenties. Superb.