A Study Guide for Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

Oscar Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. 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...

"The Picture of Dorian Gray" is the only published novel by Oscar Wilde. It appeared as the lead story in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. The magazine's editors feared the story was indecent as submitted, so they censored roughly 500 words, without Wilde's knowledge, before publication. Even so, the story was greeted with outrage by British reviewers, some of whom suggested that Wilde should be prosecuted on moral grounds, leading...

Dorian Gray, a young man of wealth and stature in late 1800's London, meets Lord Henry Wotton while posing for a portrait by his friend Basil Hallward. Once the painting is complete, Dorian realizes that it will always be young and attractive, while he will be, forced to age and wither with the years. Carelessly, he wishes the opposite were true. What happens is a treatise on morals, self-indulgence and how, crucial personal responsibility is towards...

Horror hides behind an attractive face in The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde's scandalous tale of a Victorian libertine and his life of evil excesses. Though Dorian's hedonistic indulgences leave no blemish on his ageless features, the painted portrait imbued with his soul proves a living catalogue of corruption, revealing in every new line and lesion it develops the manifold sins he has committed. Desperate to hide the physical evidence of his...

"Young Dorian Gray arrives fresh on the London social scene and is taken under the wing of corrupt, dev[i]lish Lord Henry Wotton who introduces him to the seedy pleasures of London life. Desperate to protect the youth and beauty captured in his portrait, Dorian swears he would give anything to stay as he is ... even his soul. Slipping deeper and deeper into a world of sin, sex and celebrity, his deeds grow ever more evil in an attempt to hide his...

The Picture of Dorian Gray is widely considered to be one of the great classics in contemporary Western literature. Dorian Gray, the subject of artist Basil Hallward's painting becomes obsessed with his own vanity, adopts a brand of hedonism that ultimately leads to his own misery and demise. An L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring Steve Juergens, Jim Ortlieb, Colleen Crimmins, Roger Mueller, Thomas Carroll, Paulin Brailsford, Rush...

More than 120 years after Oscar Wilde submitted The Picture of Dorian Gray for publication in Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, the uncensored version of his novel appears here for the first time in a paperback edition. This volume restores all of the material removed by the novel’s first editor. Upon receipt of the typescript, Wilde’s editor panicked at what he saw. Contained within its pages was material he feared readers would find “offensive”—especially...