Oscar Wilde (16 October 1854-30 November 1900) was an Anglo-Irish poet and playwright. Born in Dublin to an intellectual Anglican family, Wilde was well-educated, speaking fluent French and German, excelling in classics at Trinity College Dublin and at Oxford, and becoming a member of the upper strata of London society. Wilde became a poet, journalist, and playwright, writing The Importance of Being Earnest in 1895. While he married a woman, Constance Lloyd, he became the lover of Lord Alfred Douglas and was arrested for gross indecency, serving two years' hard labor from 1895 to 1897. He left for France on his release and never returned to the British Isles, and he died of meningitis in Paris in 1900 and was buried at the Père Lachaise Cemetery.
Wilde was an anarchist with socialist and communist sympathies; he was the sole literary signatory of George Bernard Shaw's petition for a pardon of the anarchists arrested after the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago, and he wrote, "Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment".