The Picture of Dorian Gray

On 20 June 1890 the Philadelphian Lippincott's Monthly Magazine published Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" as the lead story for its July number. Wilde revised and enlarged this, his first and only novel, for appearance in book form the following April. Hitherto the thirty-five-year-old author had published a book of poems (1881; largely ignored or ridiculed), had had one play produced (unsuccessfully, in New York in 1883), published a book of fairy tales (1888; on the whole well received), and had published some essays and stories in literary journals. Wilde had reviewed many novels, and discoursed on the art of the novelist in "The Decay of Lying"; now was his chance to practise what he had been preaching, and to fulfil the great potential his profile had promised when he graduated from Oxford and set about promoting himself in London's literary society. "The Picture of Dorian Gray", published in the first year of the decade that would see him feted as the most successful society playwright of his day, and then pilloried as the most infamous sexual outlaw of the time, was his first significant and successful major work of art.