Oscar Wilde was a writer.
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde ( 16 October 185430 November 1900 ) was an Irish playwright , novelist , essayist , and poet . He is remembered for his epigrams , his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray , his plays , as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death . At the turn of the 1890s , he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays , and incorporated themes of decadence , duplicity , and beauty into his only novel , The Picture of Dorian Gray ( 1890 ) . He wrote Salome ( 1891 ) in French in Paris but it was refused a licence for England due to the absolute prohibition of Biblical subjects on the English stage .