Though Oscar Wilde's legendary life and his extraordinary art are both intimately and unmistakably linked to his homosexuality, no Wilde biographer has ever really explored the full implications of his gay identity - until now. Gary Schmidgall's is a true post-Stonewall performance, the first book to assert frankly that Wilde's sexual orientation is the key to his literary accomplishments and his enduring appeal.

The Stranger Wilde sidesteps standard chronological biography to provide a brilliant portait drawn from Wilde's own writings and the observations of his contemporaries and later critics, set against the backdrop of Victorian convention, which was to undo him in the end. Here is Wilde in all his many guises: as flamboyant Oxford undergraduate, as aesthete in America, as son and brother, as husband and father, as lover and seducer of young men.

Here is the celebrated author of The Importance of Being Earnest and The Picture of Dorian Gray and the outrageous figure who went deliberately, defiantly to ruin and imprisonment. Even confirmed Wilde connoisseurs will find this book full of surprises. And for those who know him only as a writer of scathing wit and scandalous appeal, this dazzling biography will introduce a complex, paradoxical artist of genius, whose legend pales beside the provocative and fascinating truth.