He became associated with the emerging philosophy of aestheticism, led by two of his tutors, Walter Pater and John Ruskin. At university, Wilde read Greats he demonstrated himself to be an exceptional classicist, first at Trinity College Dublin, then at Oxford. A young Wilde learned to speak fluent French and German. Wilde's parents were Anglo-Irish intellectuals in Dublin. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in 'one of the first celebrity trials', imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.
After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright.
