Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was born in Dublin on 16 October 1854. Wilde was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and Magdalen College, Oxford. While at Oxford, Wilde became involved in the aesthetic movement. After he graduated, he moved to London to pursue a literary career.

Drama and tragedy marred Wilde’s private life. He married [...]

The Time Traveller (for so it will be convenient to speak of him) was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burned brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles [...]

The family consisted of four persons: Margaret Lester, widow, aged thirty six; Helen Lester, her daughter, aged sixteen; Mrs. Lester’s maiden aunts, Hannah and Hester Gray, twins, aged sixty-seven.
by Mark Twain (1835-1910)

Waking and sleeping, the three women spent their days and night in adoring the young girl; in watching the movements of her sweet [...]

Brendan Behan (1923-1964) was born in the Holles Street Hospital in Dublin. Before his becoming a writer he had many different jobs, the most well-known of these being his career as a house-painter.  At the age of sixteen he was arrested in Liverpool, England while carrying explosives [...]

The north wind was blowing a hurricane, driving through the sky big, black, heavy clouds from which the rain poured down on the earth with terrific violence.
The Drunkard by Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893)

A high sea was raging and dashing its huge, slow, foamy waves along the coast with the rumbling sound of thunder. [...]

An orphan, and possessed of an adequate income, he cut a dash, as the saying is. He had a good figure and a good carriage, a sufficient flow of words to pass for wit, a certain natural grace, an air of nobility and pride, a gallant moustache and an eloquent eye, attributes which women like. [...]

TRUE!-NERVOUS–very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am! but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses–not destroyed–not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am [...]

THE SEXTON stood in the porch of Milford meetinghouse, pulling busily at the bell rope. The old people of the village came stooping along the street. Children, with bright faces, tripped merrily beside their parents, or mimicked a graver gait, in the conscious dignity of their Sunday clothes. Spruce bachelors looked sidelong at the pretty [...]