The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde

A single-volume collected Wilde: the plays, the only novel (The Picture of Dorian Gray), the stories, the poems, the critical essays, and De Profundis, the long letter written from Reading Gaol. The output covers barely two decades, which is part of what makes the volume startling — the same man wrote the fairy tales, the epigrams, the most durable comedy in English, and then the prison letter.

Wilde is on a canon list for the prose, but the collected shape carries its own lesson about how fast a public reputation can be destroyed: the trials that put him in prison in 1895 for homosexual acts ended his career, and Dorian Gray had already been used against him as evidence.

Context: Listed under Drama, as a complete-works volume rather than a single play — the list does the same for Shakespeare.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• Oscar Wilde — the author.
• The Complete Works of Shakespeare — the list’s other complete-works entry in the Drama grouping.
• Republic of Letters — Wilde as critic and essayist, not only as playwright.