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CURRENT NEWS - October 2009Dr. Paul LeClerc — President and CEO of The New York Public Library
Photo: Todd Eberle
Paul LeClerc became President and Chief Executive Officer of The New York Public Library on December 1, 1993. Founded in 1895, The New York Public Library, with four research libraries and 87 branches in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, serves a more varied set of constituencies and has a broader mission than any library in the country. Dr. LeClerc, who from 1988 to 1993 was President of Hunter College, the largest public institution of higher education in New York City, is a scholar of eighteenth-century French literature, especially the French author Voltaire, and the author or co-editor of five scholarly volumes on writers of the French Enlightenment. His contributions to French culture have earned him the Order of the Academic Palms (Officier) and the French Legion of Honor (Chevalier), and he has received numerous honorary doctorates including those from the University of Paris III-La Nouvelle Sorbonne and Oxford University. Dr. LeClerc is presently a Trustee of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The J. Paul Getty Trust, the Carroll and Milton Petrie Foundation, the National Book Foundation, and the American Academy in Rome. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society. My favorite books are: Voltaire's Candide (1759), Albert Camus' La Peste (1947; tr. as The Plague), John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1939), and Philip Roth's Patrimony (1996). My favorite movies are: A Night at the Opera (1935) and Casablanca (1942). My favorite CDs are: Kiri Te Kawana singing the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss and W. A. Mozart's Marriage of Figaro (1984) with Kiri Te Kawana, Samuel Ramey, Frederica von Stade, Lucia Popp, and others, conducted by Sir Georg Solti. Also, Saturday Night Fever: The Original Movie Soundtrack (1977) and Gabriel Fauré's Requiem. The reason I love The New York Public Library is: "I love the Library because it embodies, for me, the central idea of the Enlightenment, namely, that a more just society can be created when 'the people' — to use the expression of our founders — are given free and unfettered access to information." Sign up for our Library E-Newsletter
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