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The brilliant and celebrated writer, dramatist, aesthete, wit, and self-proclaimed "lord of language" was the focus of Oscar Wilde: A Life in Six Acts, originally organized by the British Library. Wilde's (1854–1900) rise to success as a literary and social figure was meteoric. His decline to notoriety and disgrace was equally dramatic. Twelve years after publishing his first work of fiction, in 1888, he was dead at the age of forty-six, buried in a pauper's grave on the outskirts of Paris.