Oscar Wilde

Wilde built his fame as a talker before he built it as a writer: an Oxford aesthete who toured America in 1882 lecturing on beauty in knee breeches, then conquered London theater in the 1890s with a string of glittering comedies. The Picture of Dorian Gray, his only novel, appeared in 1890 and drew accusations of immorality he answered with epigrams rather than apology.

At the height of his success he sued his lover's father for libel, lost, and was immediately prosecuted himself for 'gross indecency.' Convicted in 1895, he served two years' hard labor, writing the long confessional letter De Profundis in his cell. Released bankrupt and ostracized, he lived his last three years in French exile under an assumed name, dying in a cheap Paris hotel in 1900.