Overview

Driven by the experience of pleasure, Dorian Gray offers his soul for the chance to be forever young and beautiful. What he loses in the exchange is more than any pleasure on earth can replace. Elegantly perverse, Oscar Wilde's powerful Gothic tale was originally censored in England. Book reviewers called it mawkish and unclean. Wilde's response to his critics are found in the book's Preface: "Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault. Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only Beauty. There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all."