# What is the best Oscar Wilde work?

> Society comedies share the field with prison writing, fairy tales and the one novel that scandalised its first readers. Pick the Wilde you would hand to a friend first.

*By YPB Team · Published November 5, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/what-is-the-best-oscar-wilde-work*

---

## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **The Picture of Dorian Gray**
   Wilde's only novel, first published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine in July 1890 and expanded into a book in 1891.
2. **The Importance of Being Earnest**
   A comedy of mistaken identities that premiered at the St James's Theatre in London on 14 February 1895.
3. **An Ideal Husband**
   A play about a government minister whose past secret threatens his career, first staged at the Haymarket Theatre in January 1895.
4. **Lady Windermere's Fan**
   Wilde's first society comedy, premiered at the St James's Theatre in February 1892.
5. **A Woman of No Importance**
   A play about an illegitimate son and his mother, premiered at the Haymarket Theatre in April 1893.
6. **Salome**
   A one-act tragedy Wilde wrote in French, published in 1893 and issued in English in 1894 with illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley.
7. **The Happy Prince and Other Tales**
   An 1888 collection of five fairy tales, including "The Selfish Giant" and "The Nightingale and the Rose".
8. **A House of Pomegranates**
   An 1891 collection of four fairy tales, among them "The Young King" and "The Fisherman and his Soul".
9. **The Canterville Ghost**
   A comic novella about an American family who move into a haunted English country house, first serialised in 1887.
10. **Lord Arthur Savile's Crime**
   An 1887 story about a young aristocrat told by a palm reader that he will commit a murder, later the title story of an 1891 collection.
11. **The Ballad of Reading Gaol**
   A long poem written in exile after Wilde's release from prison, published in 1898 under the name "C.3.3.", his cell number.
12. **De Profundis**
   A long letter to Lord Alfred Douglas that Wilde wrote in Reading Gaol in 1897, first published in abridged form in 1905.

Tags: books, classics, fiction, plays, oscar wilde