A biography is, by convention, so constructed as to cover all aspects and stages of its subject's life. This custom can, especially in the case of those individuals who lived to advanced years, lead to oversized volumes. Another reason why the urge to comprehensiveness presents a problem, at least potentially, is that even important people find it a challenge to be fascinating on duty and off, when well and sick, during adolescence and old age; yet the biography must keep us informed, since to omit the longueurs would be to distort the portrait on display. One solution is simply to tell the story of part of someone's life. This has frequently been the solution for the challenge of engaging with Oscar Wilde. He was a Victorian gentleman who did not live all that long but who seems, for a man devoted to the arts of decadent indolence, to have accomplished an awful lot. And when he was not doing things himself, he was having them done to him. Academics and critics have, therefore, focused particularly on the events of 1895, which saw Wilde's transformation from prominent celebrity to disgraced sex offender. A related slew of works, both fictional and factional, has focused on the final years after his discharge from prison. Making Oscar Wilde is distinctive in that it addresses Oscar Wilde's lecture tour of the United States. On Christmas Eve 1881, he took ship at Liverpool and was not to return to London until a year had passed. Those twelve months, according to Michèle Mendelssohn, were the making of Oscar Wilde.

This approach to Wilde is not entirely new, since there have been several books about the same events, such as David Friedman's Wilde in America: Oscar Wilde and the Making of Modern Celebrity (2014). Nevertheless, Wilde's own writings from this period have been little studied and the fascinating newspaper coverage even less so. Mendelssohn, therefore, chronicles a more-or-less familiar set of events as Wilde crossed and recrossed the United States, but she does so in ways that shed new light on these events. For example, she highlights the degree to which Wilde was (stage-)managed and the extent to which he was able to find his own voice by strategic rewriting of his lectures and adjustment of his attire on a nightly basis. She is very strong on the affective aspects of the tour, as Wilde's mood rose and fell along with the widely varying tone of his public reception. However, I do have some slight reservations about the way she handles the matter of emotion. In order to create immediacy, she often adopts an authorial position that assumes we can know exactly what Wilde was thinking at a specific moment. So, for instance, when Wilde knocked on Walt Whitman's door, we are told that “a boyhood dream was about to be fulfilled” (125); and, on his arrival at the rough mining town of Leadville, Colorado, that “no doubt the uppermost thing on his mind that night was avoiding getting murdered” (181). This approach is perhaps appropriate in a book such as this, which is targeted at a wide readership, but it does not always feel entirely rigorous. This is an important matter for an academic audience because Mendelssohn has not merely produced a well-written popular history of a stage of Oscar Wilde's life but she also claims to make—and I believe does make—an important intervention in the analysis of both his life and of contemporary cultural politics. Mendelssohn addresses what Wilde scholars have neglected: the issue of race.

Mendelssohn chronicles the multiple ways in which Wilde was racialized during his stay in the United States. Some of the most startling evidence that she presents relates to the ways in which he was satirized as a white-face minstrel performer (in other words a black person who put on white make-up in order to perform in vaudeville). This involved accusations of class transgression, in that poor blacks could be laughed at for supposedly aping the fashionable poses of their richer white cousins. The logic of race at the time did not always work in ways with which we are now familiar, notably in relation to the ways in which Irishness was associated with blackness as a negative characteristic. Where Mendelssohn is perhaps less successful is in proving her assertion that Wilde's later career was substantially shaped by these aspects of his American tour. There were plenty of dandies other than minstrels from whom Wilde could have sought inspiration in terms of style and repartee. Another way to present much of this material would have been as a case study of the operations of racialized entertainment culture in the United States. Nevertheless, the England to which Wilde returned had its own entrenched patterns of anti-Irish and anti-black prejudice. This book suggests that there is work to be done on the racialized making and unmaking of Oscar Wilde before and after his sojourn in the United States.