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Introduction
Welcome to the 3 Books To Know series, our idea is to help readers learn about fascinating topics through three essential and relevant books.
These carefully selected works can be fiction, non-fiction, historical documents or even biographies.
We will always select for you three great works to instigate your mind, this time the topic is: Gay Literature.
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde.
Bertram Cope's Year by Henry Blake Fuller .
Joseph and His Friend by Bayard Taylor.
The Picture of Dorian Gray is a Gothic and philosophical novel by Oscar Wilde, first published complete in the July 1890 issue of Lippincott's Monthly Magazine. Fearing the story was indecent, the magazine's editor deleted roughly five hundred words before publication without Wilde's knowledge. Despite that censorship, The Picture of Dorian Gray offended the moral sensibilities of British book reviewers, some of whom said that Oscar Wilde merited prosecution for violating the laws guarding public morality.
Bertram Cope's Year is a 1919 novel by Henry Blake Fuller, sometimes called the first American homosexual novel. The story is set on the campus of a university in fictional Churchton, Illinois, modeled on Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where Bertram Cope, an attractive young English instructor, is spending a year completing his thesis. While he has a certain sophistication, he is socially unaware, easily impressed by the wealthy and their comforts. Lacking confidence, Cope is too careful and self-conscious as he tries to find his place in local society.
Joseph and His Friend: A Story of Pennsylvania is an 1870 novel by American author Bayard Taylor, a prolific writer in many genres. It presented a special attachment between two men and discussed the nature and significance of such a relationship, romantic but not sexual. Critics are divided in interpreting Taylor's novel as a political argument for gay relationships or an idealization of male spirituality.
This is one of many books in the series 3 Books To Know. If you liked this book, look for the other titles in the series, we are sure you will like some of the topics.
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Authors
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for "gross indecency", imprisonment, and early death at age 46.
Henry Blake Fuller (January 9, 1857 – July 28, 1929) was a United States novelist and short story writer. He was born and worked in Chicago, Illinois. He is perhaps, the earliest novelist from Chicago to gain a national reputation. His exploration of city life was seen as relavatory, and later in his life he was perhaps the earliest established American author to explore homosexuality in fiction.
Bayard Taylor (January 11, 1825 – December 19, 1878) was an American poet, literary critic, translator, travel author, and diplomat.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde
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The Preface
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The artist is the creator of beautiful things.
To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim.
The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things.
The highest, as the lowest, form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.
Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt
