Melville House Books

“A vicious and previously unpublished diatribe against Oscar Wilde by his lover Lord Alfred Douglas” is one of the things in an archive of material by or related to Wilde set to be auctioned at Sotheby’s on Friday. According to a report by John Vincent for The Independent, Douglas, whom Wilde called “Bosie,” and who had “rejected his homosexual tendencies” and wrote the diatribe years later, attacked Wilde by saying, “He was one of the most powerful forces for evil that has happened in Europe for the last three hundred years,” and that he had “literally sold himself to the Devil.”

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.