Books, Arts & Manners: Feasting with Panthers

Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann (Knopf, 680 pp., $24.95)

Wilde’s life—encumbered by personal adornment and interior decoration, witty epigram and puzzling paradox—remains more interesting than his work. The late Richard Ellmann’s sympathetic and humane biography is written, as befits the subject, with elegance and verve. The book is structured like a classical tragedy, with a peak of glory in the third part and a poignant descent into prison, exile, and penury in the final acts. The book offers a portrait of the artist as well as a cultural history of the age.

About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers

Mr. Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of John Huston: Courage and Art.

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Oscar Wilde, by Richard Ellmann (Knopf, 680 pp., $24.95)

Wilde’s life—encumbered by personal adornment and interior decoration, witty epigram and puzzling paradox—remains more interesting than his work. The late Richard Ellmann’s sympathetic and humane biography is written, as befits the subject, with elegance and verve. The book is structured like a classical tragedy, with a peak of glory in the third part and a poignant descent into prison, exile, and penury in the final acts. The book offers a portrait of the artist as well as a cultural history of the age.