The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde's story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is his most popular work. Written in Wilde's characteristically dazzling manner, full of stinging epigrams and shrewd observations, the tale of Dorian Gray's moral disintegration caused something of a scandal when it first appeared in 1890. Wilde was attacked for his decadence and corrupting influence. He responded that, while he was 'quite incapable of understanding how a work of art can be criticized from a moral standpoint,' there is, in fact, 'a terrible moral in Dorian Gray.' A few years later the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde's homosexual liaisons, trials that resulted in his imprisonment.