The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Written By Oscar Wilde
The Picture of Dorian Gray
- Oscar Wilde
$19.99
A face that never ages. A canvas that never lies.
In a sunlit London studio, the painter Basil Hallward completes his crowning work: a full-length portrait of Dorian Gray. His muse stands at the height of youthful promise, impossibly beautiful and dangerously naive. The painting feels so alive, so unbearably perfect, that young Dorian makes an impulsive, fateful wish: to let this art grow old instead of him.
The wish holds. Dorian keeps his youth as the canvas registers every indulgence, every cruelty, and every passing year. Intoxicated by his own flawless charms, and by the influence of the brilliant, corrosive Lord Henry Wotton, Dorian remakes himself. He moves through London’s drawing rooms and opium dens with equal ease. Those who get too close unravel โ friendships frayed, loves discarded, lives destroyed โ while Dorian glides on, untouched, his face an immaculate alibi. Only the portrait, locked away in an upstairs room, keeps a record he cannot destroy.
Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray first as a magazine novella in 1890, to immediate scandal. Critics deemed it decadent, perverse, and unfit for English readers. Wilde expanded it into a novel the following year, sharpening its wit and deepening its dread. What remains is a story that moves like a thriller and cuts like philosophy โ a book about the distance between what we show the world and what we know to be true.
โAll art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril.โ
About the Author
- Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854 to intellectually prominent parents โ his mother, Jane Wilde, was a poet, writer, and Irish activist; his father, Sir William Wilde, one of Ireland’s leading surgeons. Wilde studied at Trinity College Dublin and then at Oxford, distinguishing himself as a classicist and cultivating the public persona that would make him the most famous wit of the age.
In the early 1890s, Wilde wrote stage comedies โ Lady Windermere’s Fan, An Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest โ that filled theaters and established him as the sharpest dramatist of his generation. The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel, stood apart from the comedies in its darkness, but shared their obsession with surfaces, secrets, and the cost of living by appearances.
In 1895, at the peak of his fame, Wildeโs relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas led him to public scrutiny, a conviction of โgross indecency,โ and two yearsโ imprisonment and hard labor. He emerged physically broken and financially ruined, and spent his remaining years exiled in France. He died in Paris in 1900 at the age of 46. The Picture of Dorian Gray has outlived every attempt to contain it โ banned, bowdlerized, adapted, and argued over for more than a century, it remains one of the most unsettling novels in the English language.
