Author, poet and playwright Oscar Wilde, born Oscar Fingal O?Flahertie Wills Wilde on October 16, 1854, is perhaps best known for his first and only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, published in 1891. The novel was considered immoral for its homoerotic theme, later setting the stage for a series of trials that captured worldwide attention.

Soon after publishing The Picture of Dorian Gray in book form, Wilde met his twenty-two-year old lover Lord Alfred Douglas, also known as Bosie.

Bosie's father, John Sholto Douglas, demanded he end his "intimacy" with Wilde and engaged in a campaign of slander and angry letters against the author for his indecent lifestyle. Wilde later had the senior Douglas arrested and sent to trial for libel. But what began as an attempt to quell his lover's father soon ended as a trial against his own "indecency." When Douglas' legal team threathened to produce young male witnesses that would testify to having sexual encounters with Wilde, he was forced to drop the libel charges.

Then began a series of trials known today as the Oscar Wilde trials which highlighted several allegations of sodomy against Wilde. He was later arrested for gross indencency, spending two years in prison. According to Famous Trials author Professor Douglas O. Linder, "The Wilde trials caused public attitudes toward homosexuals to become harsher and less tolerant. They caused the public to begin to associate art and homo eroticism and to see effeminacy as a signal for homosexuality."

After completing his sentence, Wilde, then bankrupt and a social outcast, reunited with Douglas for only a brief time before spending his last years traveling Europe.

On November 30, 1900 Wilde died in Paris of an ear infection.