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This Week In History, Library Style! Nov. 30: Wilde

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Libraries are places where we connect people to information that may be useful or interesting to them. Looking at some history, and connecting it to the materials we may have in our libraries, can be a good way to convince patrons to use and enjoy all the things we provide!

This week we are looking at November 30. Of course a lot of things have happened on this date – news and the big stories are the unusual things that are going on around us. One interesting thing that has happened today in 1900: Oscar Wilde died. An expert in wordplay to the end, one of his final statements is said to have been: “”My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One of us has got to go”.[201]“

“Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900) was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890s. He is best remembered for his epigrams and plays, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, and the circumstances of his criminal conviction for gross indecency for consensual homosexual acts in “one of the first celebrity trials”,[1] imprisonment, and early death from meningitis at age 46.”

Bring this historical fact to your library! You can do this with a variety of program and display ideas. We will help you to get started with a few ideas: set up a display of books on writers from the British Empire (define as broadly as you wish), set up a display of books with humor, organize a stand up open-mic for students in your library, write an essay about unjust prison sentences and conditions, let students make videos of book reviews, get the rights to watch movies based on Wilde’s books in the library.

Here are a few books you might add to your collection or share with your patrons – or just enjoy yourself!