Oscar Wilde’s only novel is considered by many to be his finest work.
The Picture of Dorian Gray was first published in 1890, in a magazine whose editor, worried it was indecent, cut about five hundred words from it without informing its author, Oscar Wilde.
Wilde insists in his Preface, “There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That’s all.”
When critics attacked the work for its immorality, Wilde responded, “Leave my book, I beg you, to the immortality that it deserves”.
