In July of 1890, Oscar Wilde published A Picture of Dorian Gray for the first time in Lippincott's Magazine. Lippincott's was a prominent literary publication from which WIlde had been denied in the past. The novel follow the life and downfall of a young man named Dorian Gray. Gray befriends a painter and falls in with a lazy bourgeois cast of hedonistic characters. A point in Gray's corruption is punctuated by the gift of a novel from one of his mentors; a small yellow book that ruins what's left of Dorian's conscious. The yellow book is apparently confirmed by Wilde to be a thematic allusion to Huysmans's A Rebours in Richard Ellman's biography of Oscar Wilde.