De Profundis (From the Depths) is a 50,000 word letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, to Lord Alfred Douglas, his lover.
Wilde was not allowed to send it.
In it he repudiates Lord Alfred for what Wilde finally sees as his arrogance and vanity; he had not forgotten Douglas's remark when he was ill: "When you are not on your pedestal you are not interesting".
He also felt redemption in his ordeal, realising that his hardship had filled the soul with the fruit of experience, however bitter it tasted at the time.

 I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world... And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me the sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom.

On his release, he gave the manuscript to his friend Ross with the putative title Epistola: In Carcere et Vinculis (Letter: In Prison and in Chains). Ross may not have carried out Wilde's instructions to send a copy to Douglas, who always denied having received it. Ross published it under the title De Profundis in 1905, expurgating all references to the Queensberry family.

The title is an allusion to Psalm 130. It was donated it to the British Museum on the understanding that it would not be made public until 1960. Complete and correct publication first occurred in 1962 in The Letters of Oscar Wilde.
Although Douglas had been the cause of his misfortunes, he and Wilde were reunited in August 1897 at Rouen. This meeting was disapproved of by the friends and families of both men. During the latter part of 1897, Wilde and Douglas lived together near Naples for a few months until they were separated by their respective families.
Wilde died of cerebral meningitis on 30 November 1900. Although someone claimed he was syphilitic, Wilde's physicians, Dr. Paul Cleiss and A'Court Tucker, reported that the condition stemmed from an old suppuration of the right ear.
Years later, when Lord Alfred served six months in prison for libelling Winston Churchill, he wrote a sonnet sequence entitled In Excelsis ("from the heights"), intending to mirror Wilde's De Profundis.