Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Invention of Modern Celebrity

The story of Oscar Wilde’s landmark 1882 American tour explains how this quotable literary eminence became famous for being famous.

On January 3, 1882, Oscar Wilde, a twenty-seven-year-old “genius”—at least by his own reckoning—arrived in New York. The Dublin-born Oxford man had made such a spectacle of himself in London with his eccentric fashion sense, acerbic wit, and extravagant passion for art and home design that Gilbert & Sullivan wrote an operetta lampooning him. He was hired to go t...