To readers of this website who have undergone the humiliating experience of a disastrous infatuation, who have desired the wrong person and known it was the wrong person but couldn't pull away, Oscar Wilde's De Profundis lays bare the misery of it—and a way out. (Read the complete version of the book, which didn't appear until a half-century after Wilde's death.) Nobody fell farther than Wilde did, from the genius wit of London society to the imprisoned sodomite roundly abhorred. “The gods had given me almost everything,” he says, astonishing talent and fame—audiences filled the theater where The Importance of Being Earnest was playing at the very time his trial started—until an ungovernable passion destroyed him.
