This edition of the Happy Prince and Other Stories includes six wonderful yet haunting stories by Oscar Wilde. First published in 1888, these stories are aboutove and friendship, selfishness, good and evil and the courage required to do the right thing even if it means risking one'sife.Written in simpleucidanguage, the stories stir deep emotions and remain with the readerong after the book is closed. "The Happy Prince', "The Selfish Giant' and "The Nightingale and the Rose' resonate with the child as much as they do with adults and are regarded as timeless classics.
Oscar Wilde was an 19th century Irish writer whose works include the play The Importance of Being Earnest and the novel The Picture of Dorian Gray. He is also one of the Victorian era's most famous dandies, a wit whose good-humored disdain for convention became less favored after he was jailed for homosexuality. Wilde grew up in a prosperous family and distinguished himself at Dublin's Trinity College and London's Oxford. He published his first volume of poems in 1881 and found work in England as a critic and lecturer, but it was his socializing (and self-promotion) that made him famous, even before the 1890 publication of The Picture of Dorian Gray. In 1895, at the height of his popularity, his relationship with the young poet Lord Alfred Douglas was declared inappropriately intimate by Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde sued for libel, but the tables were turned when it became clear there was enough evidence to charge Wilde with "gross indecency" for his homosexual relationships. He was convicted and spent two years in jail, after which he went into self-imposed exile in France, bankrupt and in ill health.
