Oscar Wilde Books in Order: Complete Bibliography & Best Starting Points
Oscar Wilde's complete bibliography in order — from The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Importance of Being Earnest to De Profundis. Best starting points and what makes Wilde essential reading.
Oscar Wilde is the most brilliant wit in the English-speaking theatrical tradition and one of the most tragic figures in Victorian literary history. His comedies — The Importance of Being Earnest, An Ideal Husband, Lady Windermere’s Fan — are among the most perfectly constructed plays in the language; his novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is a gothic masterpiece; his fairy tales are among the most beautiful in English; and De Profundis, written in prison after his conviction for gross indecency, is one of the most moving documents of a life destroyed.
He was imprisoned in 1895 at the height of his fame, released in 1897, and died in Paris in 1900 at forty-six. His work is haunted by what happened to him, and it is impossible to read his plays’ comedy of deception and identity without knowing that the man who wrote them was living a life of concealment that he knew could destroy him.
Where to Start
The Importance of Being Earnest (1895)
The most perfect English comedy. Two young men — Jack Worthing and Algernon Moncrieff — maintain fictional alter egos (Ernest) to escape their social obligations. When their deceptions converge and their female companions discover they both claim to be engaged to men named Ernest, the situation requires ever more elaborate management.
The play was written at the height of Wilde’s powers, in days rather than months, and every line is polished to comic perfection. The epigrammatic wit — “To lose one parent, Mr. Worthing, may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose both looks like carelessness” — is at its most concentrated. It is also, read carefully, a serious play about the performative nature of identity: every character is performing a version of themselves, and the question of what is authentic underneath the performance is never quite answered.
The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Wilde’s only novel, revised and expanded from its original magazine publication. Dorian Gray, young and beautiful, makes his Faustian bargain — eternal youth while his portrait ages — under the influence of Lord Henry Wotton, who is Wilde’s most direct self-projection and his most morally questionable creation. The novel moves through the decades of Dorian’s corruption, each sin absorbed by the portrait while Dorian’s face remains unchanged, until the inevitable confrontation.
The gothic machinery is handled with Wilde’s typical elegance, and the novel’s preface — “The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless” — is his aesthetic manifesto and the opening statement of his position on the relationship between art and morality.
Complete Bibliography
Fiction
| Title | Year | Note |
|---|---|---|
| The Picture of Dorian Gray | 1890 | Only novel; essential |
| The Happy Prince and Other Tales | 1888 | Fairy tales; most beloved short fiction |
| A House of Pomegranates | 1891 | Second fairy tale collection |
| Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and Other Stories | 1891 | Short fiction; comic |
Plays
| Title | Year | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Lady Windermere’s Fan | 1892 | Comedy of manners; essential |
| A Woman of No Importance | 1893 | Comedy; social satire |
| An Ideal Husband | 1895 | Political comedy; sharp |
| The Importance of Being Earnest | 1895 | Masterpiece; start here |
| Salome | 1893 | Symbolist tragedy; written in French |
Non-Fiction and Prison Writing
| Title | Year | Note |
|---|---|---|
| The Soul of Man Under Socialism | 1891 | Essay; individualism and art |
| The Ballad of Reading Gaol | 1898 | Poem; written after prison |
| De Profundis | 1905† | Prison letter; most revealing writing |
†Published posthumously in bowdlerised form; full text published 1962.
Reading Order Recommendations
New to Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest → The Picture of Dorian Gray. The comedy at its most concentrated, then the novel that shows the darkness underneath.
For prose: The Picture of Dorian Gray → The Happy Prince → De Profundis. Gothic novel, fairy tales, and the prison letter that explains everything.
Complete Wilde: The Importance of Being Earnest → An Ideal Husband → The Picture of Dorian Gray → De Profundis → The Ballad of Reading Gaol. This moves from the triumph to the destruction, and the work that came from it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the best Oscar Wilde work to start with?
The Importance of Being Earnest is the most immediately entertaining starting point — a farcical comedy about identity, deception, and the performative nature of Victorian social life, staged with perfect comic precision. It is also the work in which Wilde's wit is most concentrated: every line is a polished joke or an epigrammatic observation that earns its place. The Picture of Dorian Gray is the right choice for readers who want fiction — it is Wilde's only novel and his most sustained literary achievement.
What is The Picture of Dorian Gray about?
Dorian Gray, a beautiful young man, has his portrait painted. After listening to the dandy Lord Henry Wotton's philosophy of hedonism and eternal youth, he makes a wish: that the portrait should age while he remains young. The wish is granted, and Dorian spends the following decades in moral dissolution while his portrait absorbs the evidence of his corruption. The novel is a gothic fable, an aesthetic manifesto, and — despite Wilde's famous insistence in the preface that art has no moral purpose — a moral argument about the cost of beauty divorced from goodness.
What happened to Oscar Wilde?
Wilde was at the height of his fame and influence in 1895 when he prosecuted the Marquess of Queensberry for criminal libel after the Marquess left a card accusing Wilde of 'posing as a sodomite.' The prosecution failed; evidence emerged of Wilde's relationships with young men; he was arrested, tried, and convicted of gross indecency under laws against homosexual acts. He was sentenced to two years of hard labour in Reading Gaol. He was released in 1897, left immediately for France, and died in Paris in 1900, aged forty-six, effectively bankrupt and socially destroyed.
What is De Profundis?
De Profundis is a long letter Wilde wrote to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas during his imprisonment at Reading Gaol in 1897 — the most important document of his inner life. It is partly an indictment of Douglas's selfishness and the role their relationship played in Wilde's destruction, and partly a meditation on suffering, humility, and the Christ figure as an artist. It is unlike anything else Wilde wrote: no epigrams, no theatrical wit, just the attempt of a destroyed man to understand what happened to him and who he wants to be in what remains of his life.
