THE NAME of Oscar Wilde buoys up the heart and rouses instant expectations that what will be quoted in his name will make the language dance. Few authors in English are Cited more frequently than he. Historians of literature would if they could dismiss him as minor, but readers, and playgoers, know better. His best writings, like his best utterances, survivehim,and after almost a century receive and deserve admiration.

Of all his works The Picture of Dorian Gray is the most famous. It is Wilde's version of the Faust legend, the bartering of a soul for eternal youth and gratification. In Sibyl Vane it has its Gretchen, and in Lord Henry Wotton its Mephistopheles...

Flamboyant and controversial, Oscar Wilde was a dazzling personality, a master of wit, and a dramatic genius whose sparkling comedies contain some of the most brilliant dialogue ever written for the English stage. Here in one volume are his immensely popular novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray;his last literary work,. "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," a product of his own prison experience; and four complete plays: Lady Windermere"s Fan, his first dramatic success,An Ideal Husband, which pokes fun at conventional morality, The Importance of Being Earnest, his finest comedy, and Salome, a portrait of uncontrollable love originally written in French and faithfully translated by Richard Ellmann.

Introduction by Richard Ellmann

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Lady Windermere"s Fan

Salome

An Ideal Husband

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Ballad of Reading Goal