Annal:1988 National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
From AwardAnnals
Results of the National Book Critics Circle Award in the year 1988. For a ranked list of books, try an honor roll:
- National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography
- Nonfiction books
- Nonfiction authors
- Biography books
- Biography authors.
- 1989 Pulitzer–Biography winner
- 1988 NBCC–Biography winner
- Score: 20.39
Richard Ellmann, one of the greatest biographers of our time, found his most compelling protagonist in Oscar Wilde. The book’s emotional resonance, its riches of authentic color and conversation, and the subtlety of its critical illuminations give dazzling life to this portrait of the complex man, the charmer, the great playwright, the daring champion of the primacy of art. Drawing on a wealth of documentation, Ellmann reveals a Wilde greater and more moving than his legend has allowed, a Wilde who even today challenges our assumptions with his provocative intelligence and wit.
The biography sensitive to the tragic pattern of the story of a great subject: Oscar Wilde—psychologically and sexually complicated, enormously quotable, central to a alluring cultural world and someone whose life assumed an unbearably dramatic shape.
