Oscar Wilde/ThePicture Of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde was although he was an artist who lived in the Victorian reign, he was closer to the Modern writers in his style. He came from a very influential but controversial background. His father was an eye and ear surgeon who wrote a book himself but he was often chastized because he had three children out of wedlock. His mother also published poems and she was supposedly the heir of Dante Alighieri. He was famous for his epigrams that he wrote. They were all controversial and they all started out one way and ended in a totally different light. In his book The Picture of Dorian Gray (preface) the very first sentence and the last sentence gives a glimpse into the skill that Wilde possessed.

The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
All art is quite useless.

Wild deliberately goes from one extreme to the other. He often did this by using his famous epigrams. He also goes along to say:

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

He just bluntly ends and states "that it all" as if nothing else matters. He writes again in the preface of the book:

We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intendedly.

If there was more to the book I am sure this preface enticed people to read it, just to understand Wilde's justification of the book. This was probably one of the reasons he was so famous.