When Wilde got out of prison in 1897 after sereving two years of hard labor for gross indecency with men, he moved to France and wrote his final work, a poem about prison life, "The Ballad of Reading Gaol."

Most people attribute, "This wallpaper is terrible - one of us will have to go!" as the final words of Oscar Wilde. You will have to read on to learn about his life and the events that lead up to this statement.

Prison had been so harsh that he fainted because he was weak from hunger and being sick. When he fell, his right ear drum ruptured, and that injury lead to his death later on. The last three years of his life were spent wandering around Europe. A serious infection developed in his ear, followed by meningitis, which lead to his death.

When he died, no one reported on Oscar Wilde's reputed last words. In the weeks before his death, his friends reported that he spoke of several things more than once. These can be considered the last of his clever sayings:

I am dying beyond my means. I can't even afford to die.

My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or other of us has got to go.

The last one is not exactly Oscar Wilde's reputed last words, but it is close and that's the one most people believe were his last remarks.

Other Quotes of Oscar Wilde

I regard the theatre as the greatest of all art forms, the most immediate way in which a human being can share with another the sense of what it is to be a human being.

Art is the most intense mode of individualism that the world has known.

A man who does not think for himself does not think at all.

I can resist everything except temptation.

Biography of Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde's full name was Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde. He was born in Dublin on October 16, 1854 and died on November 30, 1900. He was taught at home where he excelled, learning French and German. He started attending college at seventeen years old, attending Trinity College at Dublin, and then going to Magdalen College at Oxford.

He did very well at Oxford, winning awards and prizes. After leaving Oxford, he worked as a writer, publishing his first set of poems in 1881. He was an ardent follower of the philosophy of aestheticism, which places emphasis on art, culture, and nature. Aesthetics study the way we perceive the world and explore other ways to look at things. In 1881, he traveled to the United States to lecture on aesthetics, giving 140 lectures in 260 days.

He married Constance Lloyd, daughter of a well-known barrister, in 1884. They had two sons right away, so he got a job with Women's World magazine. He wrote his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was published in a magazine in 1890. He began writing for the theater and wrote several well-known plays including: