When Lord Henry Wotton tells young Dorian Gray that youth and beauty are the only things worth having, and that growing old is the only tragedy that matters, Dorian believes him. And in a moment of pure human vanity he asks that that his portrait age in his place. What follows is one of the most elegant and merciless examinations of ego in the English literary canon. Oscar Wilde gives Dorian everything-beauty, wealth, charm, the devotion of everyone who meets him-and then watches, with the precision of a surgeon what a person does when there are no consequences. The Picture of Dorian Gray is a novel about what happens when something else absorbs every sin for you? It's also about aestheticism, corruption, and the particular moral vacancy that opens up when a person decides that beauty is its own justification and reward. When Wilde wrote it in 1890 it was called immoral and unfit for publication, and he was labled a degenerate. But much like Dorian's portrait, the book has aged beautifully, and outlasted every one of its critics.