Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions

With an introduction by J. H. Stape, St. Mary s University College, Strawberry Hill. Written in 1910 and first privately published in New York in 1916, Frank Harris s Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions gained almost instant notoriety. Attacked by critics for its extravagant inventions, vigorously defended by George Bernard Shaw and hauled into court for libel by Wilde s friend and lover, Lord Alfred Douglas, Harris s biography was published in England only in 1938. Famously inaccurate and lavishly self-serving, Harris s study none the less offers a highly evocative portrait of a compelling personality or rather of two personalities, for Harris never shies from enlarging upon his roles as Wilde s defender, adviser, and sometime friend. Impressionistic, vivid and well-paced, Harris s intimate account of Wilde s rise and fall will fascinate anyone with an interest in a dramatist and poet whose tempestuous, and ultimately tragic, life was his true major work. A serious contender, as one commentator put it, if there were an Olympic gold for lying, Harris provides as near as one gets in biography to a page-turner .