This is the tale of Oscar Wilde, told not at his peak of influence, but rather at the nadir of his life.
In 1885 he wrote in a letter to his friend James Whistler, stating that to be great is to be misunderstood. Wilde may or may not have known how tragically true those words would be a mere decade later. After his highly publicized trial in 1895, Wilde was convicted of "gross indecency" for his flamboyant affair with Lord Alfred Douglas, a fellow member of the elite, and sentenced to two years' hard labor. He badly miscalculated how poorly the affair would be received by both the public at large and his boyfriend's father, the 9th Marquess of Queensberry. I am sure there was a lot of material for another story underlying that, but in any case most of Wilde's friends deserted him. Upon his release in 1897, his health ruined, he went into exile in France and died three years later, nearly friendless and destitute. He was only 46 years old. A sad ending to a gifted writer's life.
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