"I treated art as the supreme reality and life as a mere mode of fiction." Even as he celebrated the artificial and raised frivolity to an art form, Oscar Wilde was creating a new vocabulary of artistic expression-one that was witty and elegant and genuinely subversive in its assault on moral imperatives. In this marvelously inclusive anthology, Richard Aldington and Stanley Weintraub present the most quotable and influential of Wilde's writings. The novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and the plays Salome and The Importance of Being Earnest are included here in their entirety, along with the complete, unexpurgated text of the prison memoir De Profundis. In addition there are selections from the comedies Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, and An Ideal Husband; reviews, poems, fairy tales that Wilde originally wrote for his children, the dialogue "The Critic as Artist," letters, and the sardonic manifesto "Pharases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young." Book jacket.