James Joyce
(1882-1941), Irish novelist and poet, whose psychological perceptions and innovative literary techniques, as demonstrated in his epic novel Ulysses, make him one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

Joyce was born in Dublin on Feb. 2, 1882, the son of a poverty-stricken civil servant. He was educated at Jesuit schools, including University College, Dublin. Raised in the Roman Catholic faith, he broke with the church while he was in college. In 1904 he left Dublin with Nora Barnacle (1885?-1951), a chambermaid whom he eventually married. They and their two children lived in Trieste, Italy, in Paris, and in Zürich, Switzerland, meagerly supported by Joyce's jobs as a language instructor and by gifts from patrons. In 1907 Joyce suffered an attack of iritis, the first of the severe eye troubles that led to near blindness. After 20 years in Paris, early in World War II, when the Germans invaded France, Joyce moved to Zürich, where he died on Jan. 13, 1941.

Early Works
As an undergraduate Joyce published essays on literature. His first book, Chamber Music (1907), consists of 36 highly finished love poems, which reflect the influence of the Elizabethan lyricists and the English lyric poets of the 1890s. In his second work, Dubliners (1914), a collection of 15 short stories, Joyce dealt with crucial episodes of childhood and adolescence and of family and public life in Dublin. His first long work of fiction, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), is largely autobiographical, re-creating his youth and home life in the story of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus.

In this work Joyce made considerable use of the stream-of-consciousness, or interior-monologue, technique, a literary device that renders all the thoughts, feelings, and sensations of a character with scrupulous psychological realism. Another early work was the play Exiles (1918).

Later Works
Joyce attained international fame with the publication (1922) of Ulysses, a novel, the themes of which are based on Homer's Odyssey. Primarily concerned with a 24-hour period in the life of an Irish Jew, Leopold Bloom, Ulysses describes also the same day in the life of Stephen Dedalus, and the story reaches its climax in the meeting of the two characters. The main themes are Bloom's symbolic search for a son and Dedalus's growing sense of dedication as a writer. Joyce further developed the stream-of-consciousness technique in this work as a remarkable means of character portrayal, combining it with the use of mimicry of speech and the parody of literary styles as an overall literary method.

Finnegans Wake (1939), Joyce's last and most complex work, is an attempt to embody in fiction a cyclical theory of history. The novel is written in the form of an interrupted series of dreams during one night in the life of the character Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Symbolizing all humanity, Earwicker, his family, and his acquaintances blend, as characters do in dreams, with one another and with various historical and mythical figures. Joyce carried his linguistic experimentation to its furthest point in Finnegans Wake by writing English as a composite language based on combinations of parts of words from various languages. His other late publications include two collections of verse, Pomes Penyeach (1927) and Collected Poems (1936), and Stephen Hero, which, although not published until 1944, was an early version of A Portrait.

Joyce employed symbols to create what he called an "epiphany," the revelation of certain inner qualities. Thus, the earlier writings reveal individual moods and characters and the plight of Ireland and the Irish artist in the early 1900s. The two later works reveal his characters in all their complexity as artists and lovers and in the various aspects of their family relationships. Using experimental techniques to convey the essential nature of realistic situations, Joyce merged in his greatest works the literary traditions of realism, naturalism, and symbolism.

George Bernard Shaw

(1856-1950), Irish-born writer, considered the most significant British dramatist since Shakespeare. In addition to being a prolific playwright (he wrote 50 stage plays), he was also the most trenchant pamphleteer since the Irish-born satirist Jonathan Swift and the most readable music critic and best theater critic of his generation. He was also one of literature' great letter writers.

A visionary and mystic, inwardly shy and quietly generous, Shaw was at the same time the antithesis of a romantic; he was ruthless as a social critic and irreverent toward institutions. Leavening even his most serious works for the stage with a comic texture, he turned what might have been treatises in other hands into plays animated by epigrams and lively dialogue.

Shaw was born on July 26,1856, in Dublin. His impractical father, an unsuccessful merchant, had emerged from the Protestant "ascendancy," the landed Irish gentry; for extra income his mother taught voice pupils. After attending both Protestant and Catholic day schools, Shaw, at the age of 16, took a clerical job; thereafter he was self-educated.

When his parents' marriage failed, his mother and sisters went to London, and Shaw joined them there in 1876.

Early Career
The next decade was one of frustration and near poverty.

Neither music criticism (written under the name of a family friend) nor a telephone company job lasted very long, and only two of the five novels Shaw wrote between 1879 and 1883 found publishers: Cashel Byron' Profession (1882), a novel about prizefighting as an occupation that anticipates the theme of prostitution as an antisocial profession in the play Mrs. Warren' Profession (1893), and An Unsocial Socialist (1883). By the mid-1880s Shaw discovered the writings of Marx and turned to socialist polemics and critical journalism. He also became a firm (and lifelong) believer in vegetarianism, a spellbinding orator, and tentatively, a playwright. He was the force behind the newly founded (1884) FABIAN SOCIETY, (q.v.), a middle-class socialist group that aimed at the transformation of English government and society. Through the Fabian Society' founders, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Shaw met the Irish heiress Charlotte Payne-Townshend (1857 - 1943), whom he married in 1898.

Shaw' early journalism ranged from book reviews and art criticism to brilliant music columns (many of them championing the controversial work of the German composer Richard Wagner) from 1888 to 1890 under the signature “Corno di Bassetto” (basset horn), later under his own initials. Shifting to the Saturday Review as drama critic (1895 - 98), Shaw became the champion of the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, about whom he had already written his influential The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891).

The First Plays
Shaw' first play, Widowers' Houses (produced 1892), combined Ibsenite devices and aims with a flouting of the romantic conventions that were still being exploited in the English theater. It was eventually published in his Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant (1898); these first seven works for the stage (the others were Candida, The Philanderer, Arms and the Man, The Man of Destiny, Mrs. Warren' Profession, and You Never Can Tell) received brief runs at best or no productions at all. Mrs. Warren was banned by the censor as obscene. One of his Three Plays for Puritans (The Devil' Disciple, Caesar and Cleopatra, and Captain Brassbound' Conversion), published in 1901, fared slightly better; Disciple, a spoof of 19th-century sentimental melodrama set in America during the Revolution, became a success in the U.S. because of its wit and the very melodramatic elements Shaw had set out to satirize. Shaw' next work, Man and Superman (1903), transformed the Don Juan legend into a play, and play-within-a-play. Although on the surface it was a comedy of manners about love and money, its action gave Shaw the opportunity to explore the intellectual climate of the new century in a series of discussions; these are the substance of the nonrealistic, almost operatic, third act, “Don Juan in Hell,” often since produced independently. With Man and Superman, John Bull' Other Island (1904), originally written for the Abbey Theatre in Dublin but rejected as a slur on the Irish character, established his reputation in London as playwright and sage.

High Comedy
In Major Barbara (1905, eventually made into a motion picture) and The Doctor' Dilemma (1906), Shaw continued, through high comedy, to probe society' complicity in its own evils. In the first play, the principles and practices of a munitions manufacturer are discovered to be religious in the highest sense, in contrast to the public and private hypocrisies of the Salvation Army and its benefactors. In the second comedy, Shaw produced a satire both on the professions and on the artistic temperament.

With the discussion plays that followed—Getting Married (1908), Misalliance (1910), and Fanny' First Play (1911)—Shaw moved into what might be described as serious farce; intellectual comedy with his usual verve for dialogue, but introducing nonrealistic elements that he later exploited more fully. Although Fanny became his longest running hit up to that time, the most durable of the three has proved to be Misalliance. The mystical side of Shaw, meanwhile, found expression in The Shewing-Up of Blanco Posnet (1909), about the sudden conversion of a horse thief, and in Androcles and the Lion (1913), which concerned true and false religious exaltation, and used the traditions of the medieval miracle play and of the Victorian Christmas pantomime.

Shaw' comic masterpiece, Pygmalion (1914; many years later popular also as a film and as the basis for the musical comedy My Fair Lady), was claimed by its author to be a didactic play about phonetics; it is, rather, about love and class and the exploitation of one human being by another.

The Postwar Years
Pygmalion was as ebullient in its outlook as Shaw' next major play, Heartbreak House (1919), exposing the spiritual bankruptcy of his generation, was pessimistic. The intellectual watershed of World War I caused the difference. Attempting to find his way out of postwar pessimism, Shaw next wrote five linked parable-plays under the collective title Back to Methuselah (1921); they explore human progress from Eden to a science-fiction future. Despite some brilliant writing, the cycle is uneven in its theatrical values and seldom performed.

For Saint Joan (1923), Shaw received the 1925 Nobel Prize in literature. In Shaw' hands the Maid of Orleans became a combination of practical mystic, heretical saint, and inspired genius.

The Last Plays
Shaw continued to write into his 90s; his last plays, beginning with The Apple Cart (1929), turned, as Europe plunged into new crises, to the problem of how people might best govern themselves and release their potential—themes he had handled before, but now approached with a tragicomic and nonrealistic extravagance that owed more to the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes than to Ibsen. Shaw died in his country home at Ayot St. Lawrence on Nov. 2, 1950.

To the end, Shaw continued to publish brilliantly argued prefaces to his plays and to flood publishers with books, articles, and cantankerous letters to the editor. Among his other work, the novella The Adventures of the Black Girl in Her Search for God (1932) and The Intelligent Woman' Guide to Socialism and Capitalism (1928) remain useful compendia of his ideas. Thousands of his sparkling letters, for example, to such English stage luminaries as Ellen Terry and Mrs. Patrick Campbell have also been published.

Although he founded no “school” of playwrights like himself, by forging a drama combining moral passion and intellectual conflict, reviving the older comedy of manners, and experimenting with symbolic farce, Shaw helped to reshape the stage of his time. His bold critical intelligence and rapier pen, brought to bear on contemporary issues, helped mold the thought of his own and later generations.

Samuel Beckett

(1906-89), Irish-born poet, novelist, foremost dramatist of the theater of the absurd, and winner of the 1969 Nobel Prize.

Beckett was born on April 13, 1906, in Foxrock, near Dublin. After attending a religion-steeped, middle-class Protestant school in the north of Ireland, he entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he earned an A.B. in Romance languages (1927) and later an M.A. (1931). Between degrees, he spent two years teaching in Paris. At the same time he continued his study of the French philosopher René Descartes and wrote his critical essay Proust (1931), which laid the philosophical foundation for his life and literary work. Significantly, he also became acquainted with the Irish novelist and poet James Joyce.

From 1932 to 1937 Beckett wrote, traveled restlessly, and held various jobs, his income supplemented by an annuity from his father, whose death in 1933 shocked him profoundly. In 1937 Beckett settled permanently in Paris, except during World War II, when, as a member of the Resistance, he fled the Nazi secret police (Gestapo). In unoccupied southern France, Beckett used his evenings to write the novel Watt (not published until 1953).

Back in Paris after the war, Beckett created four major works: his trilogy Molloy (1951), Malone Dies (1951), and The Unnamable (1953), novels that Beckett considered his greatest achievement; and the play, Waiting for Godot (1952), which most critics regard as his masterpiece. Most of his works after 1945 were written in French and later translated.

Other major works, with their English-language publication dates, include the plays Endgame (1958), Krapp's Last Tape (1959), Happy Days (1961), Play (1964), Not I (1973), That Time (1976), and Footfall (1976); the narrative prose works Murphy (1938) and How It Is (1964); and the verse collections Whoroscope (1930) and Echo's Bones (1935). The Collected Works of Samuel Beckett (22 vol.) was published in 1977.

In his novels and plays alike, Beckett focused on the wretchedness of living in an attempt to expose the essence of the human condition, which he ultimately reduced to the solitary self, or to nothingness. He also pared language down to its bare bones in a lean, disciplined prose seasoned with sardonic wit and relieved by vaudevillian patter and clowning. His influence on subsequent dramatists, particularly those who followed him in the so-called absurdist tradition, was significant, and the impact of his prose works was considerable.

William Butler Yeats

(1865-1939), Irish poet, dramatist, and Nobel laureate, who was a leader of the Irish Renaissance and one of the foremost writers of the 20th century.

Development
Yeats was born in Dublin on June 13, 1865, in an Irish Protestant family, the son of the noted Irish painter John Butler Yeats (1839-1922). He was schooled in London and studied painting in Dublin. Yeats spent much of his boyhood and school vacations with his maternal grandparents in county Sligo, renowned for its natural beauty, folklore, and legend, which inspired his enthusiasm for pre-Christian Irish tradition. In 1887 he moved with his family to London and became involved in Hindu philosophy, theosophy, and the occult. In 1889 he met the beautiful Irish patriot Maud Gonne (1866-1953), whom he loved unrequitedly the rest of his life. She inspired much of his early work and drew him into the Irish nationalist movement for independence. After the decline and death of the Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891, however, Yeats lost hope in the political movement and immersed himself in finding his literary identity, which he expressed in The Celtic Twilight (1893), a volume of essays, and The Secret Rose (1897), both of which deal with Irish legends.

He also wrote lyrical, symbolic poems on pagan Irish themes, such as The Wanderings of Oisin (1889) and The Lake Isle of Innisfree (1893), in the romantic melancholy tone he believed characteristic of the ancient Celts. Yeats returned to Ireland in 1896. He became a close friend of the nationalist playwright Augusta Lady Gregory, with whom he shared an interest in Irish lore.

He visited often her estate at Coole Park, County Galway, and eventually bought a ruined Norman castle nearby, which under the name Tower became a dominant image in his later poems. With Lady Gregory and others he helped found the Irish Literary Theater (1899), which became (1904) the famous ABBEY THEATRE, (q.v.). As its director, until the end of his life, he helped develop the theater into a center of the Irish literary revival (Irish Renaissance) and one of the leading theatrical companies of the world. Among the plays he created for it were Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902), a nationalist prose drama with Maud Gonne as the lead, and Deirdre (1907), a tragedy in verse.

In his poetry of this period, such as The Wing Among the Reeds (1899), The Shadowy Waters (1900), and The Green Helmet (1910), Yeats strove to abandon his earlier self-conscious softness and facility. His work, now less mystical and symbolic, became clearer and leaner and a new direction was shown in Responsibilities: Poems and a Play (1914).

Later Years
As Yeats grew older, he turned to practical politics, serving (1922-28) in the Senate of the new Irish Free State. He succeeded in deepening and perfecting his complex styles as the years advanced, and his later writings are generally acknowledged to be his best. They were influenced by Georgie Hyde-Lees (1893?-1968), his wife since 1917, who had a medium's gift for automated writing. A Vision (1925, revised 1937) is an elaborate attempt in prose to explain the mythology, symbolism, and philosophy that Yeats used in much of his work. It discusses the eternal opposites of objectivity and subjectivity, art and life, soul and body that are the basis of his philosophy. Poetic works in this vein include The Wild Swans at Coole (1917), The Tower (1928), and The Winding Stair (1929).

Yeats also wrote short plays on the Celtic legendary hero Cú Chulainn, combined as Four Plays for Dancers (1921). They were influenced by Japanese No plays, translated into English by the American poet Ezra Pound early in the 1920s. Much like these plays, which were written for the Japanese court of the 14th century, Yeats's plays were designed for small audiences in aristocratic drawing rooms and made use of such techniques as ritual, masks, chorus, and solemn dance. In these plays Yeats brought poetry back to theater and fused strict realism with mythic vision.

Continually revising his work, Yeats recounted episodes from his life in his Autobiographies (1927) and Dramatis Personae (1936). He received the Nobel Prize for literature in 1923. Yeats died in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, France, on Jan. 18, 1939. In 1948, he was reburied in a churchyard at Drumcliffe, in Sligo, as he had originally wished, under the epitaph given in "Under Ben Bulben," in his Last Poems (1939).

The W.B. Yeats International Summer School, focusing on Yeats's poetry, plays, and prose in a wide variety of contexts, is held annually in Sligo.

Jonathan Swift

(1667-1745), Anglo-Irish satirist and political pamphleteer, considered one of the greatest masters of English prose and one of the most impassioned satirists of human folly and pretension.

Swift was born in Dublin on Nov. 30, 1667, and educated at Trinity College in that city. He obtained employment in England in 1689 as secretary to the diplomat and writer Sir William Temple. Swift's relations with his employer were not amicable, and in 1694 the young man went back to Ireland, where he took religious orders. Effecting a reconciliation with Temple, he returned to the latter's household in 1696. There he supervised the education of Esther Johnson (1681-1728), daughter of the widowed companion to Temple's sister. Swift remained with Temple until the latter's death in 1699. His stay, although frequently marred by quarrels with his employer, gave him the time for an immense amount of concentrated reading and for writing.

Early Writings
Among Swift's earliest prose work was The Battle of the Books (1697), a burlesque of the controversy then raging in literary circles over the relative merits of ancient and modern writers. In this work Swift championed the ancients and, with mordant satire, attacked the pedantry and sham scholarship of his day. His Tale of a Tub (1704) is the most amusing of his satirical works and the most strikingly original. In it the author ridiculed with matchless irony various forms of pretentious pedantry, mainly in literature and religion.

The book gave rise to grave doubts concerning Swift's religious orthodoxy, however, and it is thought that because Queen Anne was offended, Swift lost his chance for ecclesiastical preferment in England.

Although nominally a Whig, Swift differed from his party on many important questions. In 1710 a Tory government came to power in England, and Swift was won over to its ranks. He turned his biting satire now against the Whigs in a series of brilliant squibs, assumed the editorship of the Examiner, the official Tory publication, and produced a number of pamphlets, in all of which he ably defended the policies of the Tory administration. Of these papers the most eloquent and influential was The Conduct of the Allies (November 1711), in which Swift charged that the Whigs had prolonged the War of the Spanish Succession out of self-interest. The pamphlet was instrumental in procuring the dismissal of John Churchill, 1st duke of Marlborough, the commander in chief of the British armies.

Stella and Vanessa
Swift's Journal to Stella (Stella being the private name by which the author addressed Esther Johnson, now living in Dublin, in a series of intimate letters) was begun in 1710. This work, with its use of terms of endearment drawn from the language of the nursery, reveals a curious aspect of the great satirist's enigmatic personality. Scholars are unsure of Swift's exact relationship with Stella; it is thought that they may have been secretly married. The only other woman in Swift's life was Esther Vanhomrigh (1690-1723), daughter of a Dublin merchant of Dutch descent. Vanhomrigh (whom Swift also taught and whom he referred to as Vanessa) became passionately enamored of him, but he did not return her love.

In 1713, Swift was appointed dean of Saint Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. The following year the Tory administration fell, and Swift's political power was ended. In 1724-25 he issued, anonymously, his Drapier's Letters, a series of highly effective pamphlets that secured the abrogation of the royal patent granted to an Englishman coining copper halfpence in Ireland. For his championship of their cause in these essays and in A Modest Proposal (1729), Swift became a hero of the Irish people. The latter work embodies the mordantly ironic suggestion that the children of the Irish poor be sold as food to the wealthy, thus turning an economic burden to general profit.

Gulliver's Travels
Swift's masterpiece, Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, more popularly titled Gulliver's Travels, was published anonymously in 1726; it met with instantaneous success. Swift's satire was originally intended as an allegorical and acidic attack on the vanity and hypocrisy of contemporary courts, statesmen, and political parties; but in the writing of his book, which is presumed to have taken more than six years, he incorporated his ripest reflections on human society. Gulliver's Travels is, therefore, a savagely bitter work, mocking all humankind. Nonetheless, it is so imaginatively, wittily, and simply written that it became and has remained a favorite children's book.

Swift's last years, after the deaths of Stella and Vanessa, were overshadowed by a growing loneliness and dread of insanity. He suffered frequent attacks of vertigo, and a period of mental decay ended with his death on Oct. 19, 1745. He was buried in his own cathedral beside the coffin of Stella. His epitaph, written by him in Latin, reads "Here lies the body of Jonathan Swift, D.D., dean of this cathedral, where burning indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. Go, traveler, and imitate if you can a man who was an undaunted champion of liberty."

Seamus Heaney

Born at the family's farm in Mossbawn, County Derry, Northern Ireland, he was educated at Queen's University, Belfast. He obtained a teaching certificate and taught at a secondary school and at St. Joseph's College of Education, then served as a lecturer at Queen's University (1966-72) and Carysfort College (1976-82) in Dublin.

Since 1982 he has taught one semester annually at Harvard University in the U.S.; he was also a professor of poetry at Oxford University (1989-94). Heaney's poetry ranges from farm and village themes to subjects from history, language, and national identity. He first came to public attention in the mid-1960s, along with a group of writers described as the Northern School of Irish writing and known for embracing new themes, such as the hope for reconciliation and the end of violent sectarianism in Northern Ireland. Heaney's first important published volume was North in 1975. He drew on Dante for his Station Island (1984), a narrative sequence dramatizing Irish politics and history. Among his other books of poetry are Death of a Naturalist (1966), Door into the Dark (1969), Field Work (1979), and collected works such as New Selected Poems: 1966-1987 (1990) and The Spirit Level (1996). He has also translated from Gaelic (the Middle Irish history of Suibhne Gealt) in Sweeney Astray (1982) and from Latin (parts of Virgil's Aeneid) in Seeing Things (1991).

Heaney's essayistic prose collections include The Government of the Tongue (1988) and The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures (1995).

He was also involved with Field Day, a theater company founded in 1980, which produced his version of Sophocles's Philoctetes in 1990 under the title The Cure at Troy (published under this title in 1991).

Heaney was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize in literature for “works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past.” He has served as judge and lecturer for numerous poetry competitions and conferences on literature, involving himself especially with the annual W. B. Yeats International Summer School in Sligo. Heaney published a translation of the Anglo-Saxon epic poem, BEOWULF, (q.v.), into modern English verse in the year 2000. The edition, which includes his essay-preface and provides also the Anglo-Saxon original, was awarded England's prestigious Whitbread Prize.

Oscar Wilde

Wilde was born Oct. 16, 1854, in Dublin, and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. As a youngster he was exposed to the brilliant literary talk of the day at his mother's Dublin salon. Later, as a student at the University of Oxford, he excelled in classics, wrote poetry, and incorporated the Bohemian life-style of his youth into a unique way of life. As an aesthete, the eccentric young Wilde wore long hair and velvet knee breeches. His rooms were filled with various objets d'art-sunflowers, peacock feathers, blue china; Wilde claimed to aspire to the perfection of the china. His attitudes and manners were ridiculed in the comic periodical Punch and satirized in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera Patience (1881). Nonetheless, his wit, brilliance, and flair won him many devotees.

Wilde's first book was Poems (1881). His first play, Vera, or the Nihilists (1882), was produced in New York City, where he saw it performed while he was on a highly successful lecture tour. Upon returning to England he settled in London and married in 1884 a wealthy Irish woman, with whom he had two sons. Thereafter he devoted himself exclusively to writing.

In 1895, at the peak of his career, Wilde became the central figure in one of the most sensational court trials of the century. The results scandalized the Victorian middle class; Wilde, who had been intimate with the young Lord Alfred Douglas (1870-1945), was convicted of sodomy. Sentenced in 1895 to two years of hard labor in prison, he emerged financially bankrupt and spiritually downcast. He spent the rest of his life in Paris, using the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth. He was converted to Roman Catholicism before he died of meningitis in Paris on Nov. 30, 1900.

Prose
Wilde's early works included two collections of fairy stories, The Happy Prince (1888) and A House of Pomegranates (1892), and a group of short stories, Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (1891). His only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), is a melodramatic tale of moral decadence, distinguished for its brilliant, epigrammatic style. Although the author fully describes the process of corruption, the shocking conclusion of the story frankly commits him to a moral stand against self-debasement.

Plays
Wilde's most distinctive and engaging plays are the four comedies Lady Windermere's Fan (1892), A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895), and The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), all characterized by adroitly contrived plots and remarkably witty dialogue. Wilde, with little dramatic training, proved he had a natural talent for stagecraft and theatrical effects and a true gift for farce. The plays sparkle with his clever paradoxes, among them, such famous inverted proverbs as "Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes" and "What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing."

In contrast, Wilde's Salomé is a serious drama about obsessive passion. Originally written in French, it was produced in Paris in 1894 with the celebrated actor Sarah Bernhardt. It was subsequently made into an opera by the German composer Richard Strauss.

Late Writings
While in prison Wilde composed De Profundis (From the Depths; 1905), an apology for his life. Some critics consider it a serious revelation; others, a sentimental and insincere work. The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), written at Berneval, France, just after his release and published anonymously in England, is the most powerful of all his poems. The starkness of prison life and the desperation of people interned are revealed in beautifully cadenced language. For years after his death the name of Oscar Wilde bore the stigma attached to it by Victorian prudery. Wilde, the artist, now is recognized as a brilliant epigrammatist and social commentator, whose best work remains viable.

Elizabeth Bowen

Irish novelist and short-story writer, born in Dublin, and educated in England. She began to write short stories at the age of 20, and Encounters, her first short-story collection, was published in 1923.

Her first novel, The Hotel, appeared in 1927. A subtle, perceptive, often witty observer of upper-class life, Elizabeth Bowen used as one of her favorite themes the predicament of sensitive individuals in conflict with their environment. Some of her later works include the short-story collection A Day in the Dark (1965); the novels The Heat of the Day (1949), The Little Girls (1963), and Eva Trout, or Changing Seasons (1968); the essay collection A Time in Rome (1960); and Afterthoughts (1962), autobiography and criticism.