Oscar Wilde Biography | Author of The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest Author Biography

Oscar (Fingal O'Flahertie Wills) Wilde was born on October 15 (though some sources cite October 16), 1854 (some sources cite 1856) in Dublin, Ireland, where he would spend his youth His father was a celebrated eye and ear surgeon who was knighted by Queen Victoria for founding a hospital and writing an influential medical textbook. Wilde's mother, Jane Francesca Elgee Wilde, came to be called "Speranza," writing poems, stones, essays, and folklore meant to give hope to advocates of rights for women and Ireland.

Wilde won prizes in the classics at Portora Royal School in Ulster, and his continued success in classic studies at Dublin's Trinity College won him a scholarship to attend Magdalen College, Oxford, where he earned a B.A. In 1878, me undergraduate Wilde won the Newdigate Prize for his poem "Ravenna."

While at Oxford, the ideas of Walter Pater and John Ruskin shaped Wilde's thinking...
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