Oscar Wilde supposedly said that these fables were intended neither for the British child nor the British public . A follow-up to his first popular fairy-tale collection (‘The Happy Prince and Other Tales’), ‘A House of Pomegranates’ (1891) is indeed decidedly darker and more adult. The collection includes The Young King , The Birthday of the Infanta, The Fisherman of his Soul , and The Star Child . While similar, in some ways, to the fairy-tales of Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm these have a certain interesting Wilde flair to them that is hard to pinpoint. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was an Irish playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet, famous for ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ and ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ to name a couple. He was believed to be gay and met a lot of resistance in his life on that account. He died in Paris at the age of 46.
