"I have nothing to declare except my genius". Oscar Wilde in America

Writing about Oscar Wilde in America necessarily implies making reference to the yearlong tour of the United States (the crucial year being 1882) in which the Anglo-Irish writer in order to promote Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta, Patience or Bunthorne’s Bride embarked on a long series of lectures and interviews which turned him into a global celebrity. Nevertheless, writing about “Oscar Wilde in America” also means speaking about the responses to Wilde’s enunciations, that is to the way America reacted to the Wildean genius not only in the 1880s, but also in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first century. Wilde left an important legacy in the States which can be detected in the extraordinary lives of such (Wilde-like) icons as Truman Capote and Andy Warhol, in the American campaigns for homosexual rights, in the recent and extremely clever academic readings of his work , and, more importantly, in the magnificent response of contemporary American popular culture (in particular of cinema and music ) to the Wildean experience.