The Picture of Dorian Grey

Introduction by Jeffrey Eugenides Nominated as one of America´s best-loved novels by PBS´s The Great American Read Written in his distinctively dazzling manner, Oscar Wilde´s story of a fashionable young man who sells his soul for eternal youth and beauty is the author´s most popular work. The tale of Dorian Gray´s moral disintegration caused a scandal when it ?rst appeared in 1890, but though Wilde was attacked for the novel´s corrupting in?uence, he responded that there is, in fact, "a terrible moral in Dorian Gray." Just a few years later, the book and the aesthetic/moral dilemma it presented became issues in the trials occasioned by Wilde´s homosexual liaisons, which resulted in his imprisonment. Of Dorian Gray´s relationship to autobiography, Wilde noted in a letter, "Basil Hallward is what I think I am: Lord Henry what the world thinks me: Dorian what I would like to be--in other ages, perhaps..."