Oscar Wilde Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was born October 16, 1854, in Dublin, the second child and second son of a surgeon and his literary wife. After attending boarding school in the north of Ireland, Wilde studied classics at Trinity College, Dublin, and at Oxford. He married in 1884 and began working steadily at his writing. His books include The Happy Prince and Other Tales (1888), written for his sons, and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), his only novel. A public insult from the father of a friend set off a chain of events that led to Wilde being imprisoned for homosexual conduct He moved to France after his release, and died of meningitis on November 30, 1900, in a Paris hotel.