The Picture of Dorian Gray and Other Writings (Bantam Classics Series) » (Reissue)

The ever-quotable Oscar Wilde once said, "Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it." From his outsize celebrity in Victorian London to his authorship of fiction, drama, and poetry that uniquely captured his era, it's fair to say that Wilde succeeded on both counts.

Flamboyant and controversial, Oscar Wilde was a dazzling personality, a master of wit, and a dramatic genius whose sparkling comedies contain some of the most brilliant dialogue ever written for the English stage. Here in one volume are his immensely popular novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray; his last literary work, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” a product of his own prison experience; and four complete plays: Lady Windermere’s Fan, his first dramatic success, An Ideal Husband, which pokes fun at conventional morality, The Importance of Being Earnest, his finest comedy, and Salomé, a portrait of uncontrollable love originally written in French and faithfully translated by Richard Ellmann.

Every selection appears in its entirety–a marvelous collection of outstanding works by the incomparable Oscar Wilde, who’s been aptly called “a lord of language” by Max Beerbohm.