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    Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit
    Unavailable
    Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit
    Unavailable
    Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit
    Ebook547 pages9 hours

    Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit

    By Hesketh Pearson

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    About this ebook

    Few personalities in the history of literature have aroused so much interest as that of Oscar Wilde, yet the essentials of his nature are still not recognized and we are left to catch glimpses of the real man in the scattered reminiscences of the period.

    Here, at last, is the whole life of the man who was probably the most delightful and witty conversationalist the world has ever seen. Hesketh Pearson has succeeded in presenting Oscar Wilde as he was at the Café Royale in London, and in making the reader see him as the darling of the drawing rooms, the conversationalist, not the convict.

    But this is not a hero-worshipping book—Pearson shows Wilde’s shortcomings and gives instances when Wilde was over-dramatic and when he failed to come off as a writer and a talker.

    This is a remarkable recreation of a genius set sharply in contrast to a period that battened on his wit, persecuted him, failed to understand him. Some of Wilde’s stories make their first appearance in this book as do some of the conversational original s of several witticisms in his plays.

    “The most true, the most sensible and the fairest book which has yet been written about Oscar Wilde.”—Harold Nicholson in The Observer

    Illustrated with 15 gravure plates.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherValmy Publishing
    Release dateFeb 27, 2018
    ISBN9781787209992
    Unavailable
    Oscar Wilde: His Life and Wit
    Author

    Hesketh Pearson

    Born in 1887 at Hawford, Worcesterhire, Hesketh Pearson was educated at Bedford Grammar School, then worked in a shipping Office and spent two years in America before beginning a career as an actor in 1911. Until 1931 he worked successfully in the theatre, which provided many insights for his subsequent writing career. Pearson’s early works included ‘Modern Men and Mummers’ which consisted of sketches of well-known figures in the theatre, and also short stories in ‘Iron Rations’. ‘Doctor Darwin’, a biography of Darwin which was published in 1930, was widely acclaimed and established him as one of the leading popular biographers of his day. Subsequently he concentrated on his writing full-time. However, for a period of some seven years he was in the doldrums, following an unsuccessful attempt to get the title ‘Whispering Gallery’ published. He nonetheless persisted, and subsequently had published several important biographies of major figures, such as Conan Doyle, Gilbert and Sullivan and George Bernard Shaw. His skill and expertise was widely recognised, such that for example he was able to gain the co-operation of Shaw, who both contributed and later wrote a critique of his biography, and the executors of Conan Doyle’s estate who gave Pearson unprecedented access to private papers. Pearson was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He died in 1964. His biographies have stood the test of time and are still regarded as definitive works on their subjects.

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