The Happy Prince & Other Stories (Puffin Classics) - Softcover

Wilde, Oscar

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140366911 ISBN 13: 9780140366914

Publisher: Puffin Classics, 1994

Synopsis

Nine haunting fairy tales: The Happy Prince, The Selfish Giant, The Devoted Friend, The Remarkable Rocket, The Nightingale and the Rose, The Young King, The Birthday of the Infanta, The Star Child, The Fisherman and his Soul - Oscar Wilde made up these very special fairy tales for his own children. They loved to hear about the happy prince who was not really as happy as he seemed, and the selfish giant who learned to love the little children he had once hated.

About this title

About the Author

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin in 1854. He went to Trinity College, Dublin and then to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he began to propagandize the new Aesthetic (or 'Art for Art's Sake') Movement.
Despite winning a first and the Newdigate Prize for Poetry, Wilde failed to obtain an Oxford scholarship, and was forced to earn a living by lecturing and writing for periodicals. After his marriage to Constance Lloyd in 1884, he tried to establish himself as a writer, but with little initial success. However, his three volumes of short fiction, The Happy Prince (1888), Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (1891) and A House of Pomegranates (1891), together with his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), gradually won him a reputation as a modern writer with an original talent, a reputation confirmed and enhanced by the phenomenal success of his Society Comedies - Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest, all performed on the West End stage between 1892 and 1895.
Success, however, was short-lived. In 1891 Wilde had met and fallen extravagantly in love with Lord Alfred Douglas. In 1895, when his success as a dramatist was at its height, Wilde brought an unsuccessful libel action against Douglas's father, the Marquess of Queensberry. Wilde lost the case and two trials later was sentenced to two years' imprisonment for acts of gross indecency. As a result of this experience he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol. He was released from prison in 1897 and went into an immediate self-imposed exile on the Continent. He died in Paris in ignominy in 1900.

Edition details

• Publisher: Puffin Classics
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140366911
• ISBN 13: 9780140366914
• Binding: Paperback
• Illustrator: Bo Lars
• Number of pages: 224