Making Oscar Wilde

Witty and charismatic, Wilde is one of the Greats of English literature. Today, his plays and stories are beloved around the world, but it was not always so. His afterlife has given him the legitimacy that life denied him. Making Oscar Wilde reveals the untold story of young Oscar’s career in Victorian England and post-Civil War America, and tracks a larger-than-life hero on an unforgettable adventure to make his name. Michele Mendelssohn dramatizes Wilde’s rise, fall, and resurrection as part of a spectacular transatlantic pageant. With superb style and story-telling, she brings to life the charming young Irishman who set out to captivate the United States and Britain with his words, and ended up conquering the world. This ground-breaking revisionist history shows how Wilde’s tumultuous early life embodies the story of the Victorian era as it tottered towards modernity. Riveting and original, Making Oscar Wilde is a masterful account of a life like no other.