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 Salome, a portrait of uncontrollable love originally written in French and faithfully translated by Richard Ellmann.

THE NAME of Oscar Wilde buoys up the heart and rouses instant expectations that what will be quoted in his name will make the language dance. Few authors in English are cited more frequently than he. Historians of literature would if they could dismiss him as minor, but readers, and playgoers, know better. His best writings, like his best utterances, survive him,and after almost a century receive and deserve admiration.

Of all his works The Picture of Dorian Gray is the most famous. It is Wilde’s version of the Faust legend, the bartering of a soul for eternal youth and gratification. In Sibyl Vane it has its Gretchen, and in Lord Henry Wotton its Mephistopheles. The novel has survived, in part because of its inadequacies. Wilde had the raconteur’s impatience with details; when the publisher wanted more pages, he composed them at once, adding whole chapters in unexpected places. Yet the result vindicates him.The padding has the effect of making the book elegantly casual, as if writing a novel were a diversion rather than a struggle. No one could mistake it for a workmanlike job; our hacks can do that for us. And it gathers momentum, the interpolated materials increasing rather than lowering suspense. The underlying legend arouses deep and criminal yearnings; the contrast of these with the polish of English civilization at its verbal peak makes for an unexpected conjunction.

Introduction by Richard EUmann

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Lady Windermere’s Fan

An Ideal Husband

The Importance of Being Earnest

Ballad of Reading Gaol