Books: My Own Boy ...

THE LETTERS OF OSCAR WILDE (958 pp.)—Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis—Harcourt, Brace & World ($15).

The gods had given me almost everything. I had genius, a distinguished name, high social position, brilliancy, intellectual daring; I made art a philosophy, and philosophy an art; I altered the minds of men and the colors of things; there was nothing I said or did that did not make people wonder . . . I summed up all systems in a phrase, and all existence in an epigram.

So wrote the unhappy prisoner of Reading Gaol to Lord Alfred Douglas...

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