André & Oscar

In the Autumn of 1891, Oscar Wilde set about conquering literary Paris. Gide was dazzled by the Irishman's energy and verve, but was driven to the edge of a nervous breakdown by Wilde's merciless paradoxes and questioning of religious faith. The two writers met repeatedly over the next ten years in France, Italy, and North Africa, both before and after Wilde's imprisonment. But by the time Wilde died in Paris in 1900, the tables had been turned. He was impoverished and disgraced, while Gide was well launched on a literary career that would make him the most famous French writer of his generation and win him the Nobel Prize. Andre and Oscar charts the stormy emotions of the Gide-Wilde friendship as well as the influence they had on each other. But it also looks at the two men's live through the eyes of their mothers, their wives, and their lovers, documented largely through diaries and letters from the period and illustrated with contemporary photographs. The book also provides an often surprising insight into what W. H. Auden would much later call the "Homintern" - an international network of gay men and their young companions - as well as the moral hypocrisy of the 1890s.