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Mentioning Oscar Wilde as a "'writer of children's books'" is not
necessarily "relegat[ing]" Wilde. Although we know Wilde primarily for
his plays, especially the Importance of Being Earnest and Salome, The
Picture of Dorian Grey, and maybe The Ballad of Reading Gaol (his Decay
of Lying revolutionized my critical thinking and is cognate with
Nabokov's philosophy, whether or not Nabokov actually read it), Wilde
did write two important children's books. Nabokov said as a child he
read Wilde and so it is not at all unreasonable to infer that those were
what he was alluding to. "The Happy Prince" and "The Selfish Giant" are
classic children's stories, which have stuck in my memory and might well
have also stuck in Nabokov's.
Eric Hyman