May 25

In literary history

• 1895Oscar Wilde was sentenced to two years' hard labour for gross indecency, the maximum the law allowed. He entered prison the author of The Importance of Being Earnest and emerged two years later with nothing left but the poem it cost him to survive it.

Writers born on May 25

• Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803),
• Raymond Carver (1938)

The Daily Canon for May 25

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe (1958).