num_pages: 540
description: Oscar Wilde said of himself, “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my work.” Now, for the first time, Neil McKenna focuses on the tormented genius of Wilde’s personal life, reproducing remarkable love letters and detailing Wilde’s until-now unknown relationships with other men.McKenna has spent years researching Wilde’s life, drawing on extensive new material, including never-before published poems as well as recently discovered trial statements made by male prostitutes and blackmailers about Wilde. McKenna provides explosive evidence of the political machinations behind Wilde’s trials for sodomy, as well as his central role in the burgeoning gay world of Victorian London. Dazzlingly written and meticulously researched, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde fully charts Wilde’s astonishing odyssey through London’s sexual underworld and paints a frank and vivid psychological portrait of a troubled genius.
language: English
title: The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography
titlecomplete: The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde: An Intimate Biography
characters: George Alexander, George Ives, Archibald Brainridge, John  Gray, Dorian Gray, John Douglas, 9th Marquess of Queensberry, John Addington Symonds, Oscar Browning, Constance Lloyd, Francis Douglas, Viscount Drumlanrig, Frank Harris, Cyril Graham, Walter Pater, Henry Labouchère, Alec Scudder, André Gide, Robert Sherard, Lord Alfred Douglas, Robbie Ross, More Adey, Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, William Shakespeare, Reginald Turner, Edward Carson, W.H. Auden, Willie Hughes, George Bernard Shaw, Marc-André Raffalovich, Walt Whitman, Clive Durham, William Butler Yeats, Max Beerbohm, Maurice Hall, Richard Ellmann, Lionel Johnson, Oscar Wilde, Edward Shelley, Charles Kains Jackson
genres: Historical, Biography, Queer, LGBT, British Literature, Nonfiction, Gay, Literature, Biography Memoir, History
ratings_count: 738
places: England, Paris, London, England
awards: awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Stonewall Book Award
category: Non-Fiction, awardedAt: 1136102400000
name: Randy Shilts Award
category: Gay Nonfiction
publisher: Basic Books