Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions

By Harris, Frank

Book Id: WPLBN0002954087
Format Type:
File Size: 466.54 MB
Reproduction Date: 2009

Title:	Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions
Author:	Harris, Frank
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Non-fiction, Biography
Collections:	Audio Books Collection, Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions
Historic Publication Date:	1916
Publisher:	LibriVox Audio Books


Citation APA MLA Chicago Harris, B. F. (1916). Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions. Retrieved from http://gutenberg.us/

Description
Consumers of biography are familiar with the division between memoirs of the living or recently dead written by those who knew the subject more or less intimately, and the more objective or scholarly accounts produced by later generations. In the case of Wilde, as presented to us by Frank Harris, we are in a way doubly estranged from the subject. We meet with Oscar the charismatic talker, whose tone of voice can never be reproduced – even if a more scrupulous biographer had set down his words accurately – and we are perhaps already aware of him as Wilde the self-destructive celebrity who uneasily fills the place of the premier gay icon and martyr in our contemporary view. Neither of these images will do. We need to read as many accounts as possible. Harris, though himself a self-advertising literary and sexual buccaneer, takes a wincingly representative view of Wilde’s homophile activity: for him it is a patrician excrescence, the abominable vice of the few, contracted at English boarding schools – though thankfully “not infectious” as far as he himself is concerned. What a long road we have to travel to arrive at the essentially gay man of today! But there are many shortcuts to take us back to where we came from… (Summary by Martin Geeson)

Summary
Electronic recorded live performance of a reading

Excerpt
Biography