Oscar Wilde's Real Name: Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde

Quick answer: Oscar Wilde's full name was Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. He was born on October 16, 1854, in Dublin, Ireland. Oscar Wilde was his own name, used in full on formal records and shortened in literary life. He wrote The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) and the comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). In 1895 he was convicted of gross indecency and imprisoned. He died in Paris on November 30, 1900, at 46 (Britannica; Biography.com).

Real name and early life

Biography.com and Britannica both give his full name as Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde, born on October 16, 1854, in Dublin. The Library of Congress files him as "Wilde, Oscar, 1854-1900," with variants that include the longer form of the name and, later, "Melmoth, Sebastian, 1854-1900," a name he used after prison.

His father, William Wilde, was a leading Irish surgeon. His mother, Jane Francesca Wilde, née Elgee, was a poet who wrote as Speranza. He studied at Trinity College Dublin and at Oxford, and began publishing poetry while a student. In 1884 he married Constance Lloyd; they had two sons, Cyril, born in 1885, and Vyvyan, born in 1886.

Career highlights

He became a spokesman for the Aesthetic movement, often summed up as "art for art's sake." His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, appeared in 1891 and was attacked by some Victorian critics as immoral. He answered that books were well written or badly written, not moral or immoral. His social comedies, including Lady Windermere's Fan, A Woman of No Importance, An Ideal Husband, and The Importance of Being Earnest, made him one of the most popular dramatists in London in the early 1890s.

Conviction and imprisonment

In 1895 Wilde brought a libel action that collapsed, and he was then prosecuted and convicted of gross indecency. He was sentenced to prison and served most of the term at Reading Gaol, where he wrote the long letter later published, in cut form, as De Profundis (1905). He was released in May 1897 and went to France. His last major work was The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898). In January 2017 he was among the men posthumously pardoned under Britain's Turing Law.

Death

Biography.com says he died of meningitis at the Hôtel d'Alsace in Paris on November 30, 1900, at 46.

Name notes for searchers

Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was his full given name; Oscar Wilde is the short form used on his books. After leaving prison he sometimes used the name Sebastian Melmoth. Spellings of O'Flahertie vary slightly in older catalogs.