Making Oscar Wilde

Michèle Mendelssohn is a literary critic and cultural historian. She is Associate Professor of English Literature at Oxford University, earned her doctorate from Cambridge University, and was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University. Mendelssohn's previous books include Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and Aesthetic Culture and two co-edited collections of literary criticism, Alan Hollinghurst and Late Victorian Into Modern (shortlisted for the 2017 Modernist Studies Association Book Prize). She has published in The New York Times, The Guardian, African American Review, Journal of American Studies, Nineteenth Century Literature, and Victorian Literature and Culture.

Mendelssohn's remarkable book focuses on the American year ... it uncovers material missed by lengthier biographies, even Richard Ellmann's, and conveys the excitement of real research and discovery.

• List of Plates Prologue: What's the matter with Oscar Wilde? PART ONE, 1854-1881 Turning Points Do You Find the World Very Hollow? Astonishing the Dons Not Having Set the World Quite on Fire PART TWO, 1882-1883 Colonel Morse's Campaign Oscar Dear Mr. Wild of Borneo, or The Paddy Life Imitates Art Is it Manhood? The War of Art Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing Son of Speranza Underground Men Going South The Confederate PART THREE, 1883-1900 Success is a Science You Have Made Your Name By the Throat Epilogue: The Private View Appendix: The Mystery of Wilde's Black Valet