Four years out of Oxford, Oscar Wilde was probably the first person to attain celebrity in its modern sense: he became famous for being famous.  Wilde was 27 when he sailed across the Atlantic in 1882. He had one unproduced play and a self-published and not well-received volume of poems to his name. He was, though, already celebrated in London society: the flamboyantly dressed darling of the dinner table and the soirée; the coiner of the dazzling paradox. He was very calculatedly his own creation – his talk, his dress, his personality all made for a work of art.But Wilde was unknown in the US. His lecture tour was a publicity stunt dreamed up (unbeknownst to Wilde) by the theatrical impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte to promote Patience, with its aesthete character&nb