Oscar Wilde was a prolific talent who ignored the boundaries in his art and his life. As a writer, he mastered many disparate forms: poems, essays, novels, plays and children's stories. His best-known work, The Picture of Dorian Gray, cemented his reputation as the most colorful force in the drab gray of Victorian England. But the nonconformity he expressed in his works and his appearance--he was famously flamboyant--would soon bring the Irish-born...