The People’s University

From the Graduates of The New York Public Library:

The New York Public Library is often thought of as the great "People’s University." It serves everyone for free. Library users, visitors, and program-goers are its students. All of us scientists, actors, writers, job-seekers, architects, journalists, businessmen, first-time readers, designers, statesmen, students, and teachers are "alumni" of this great free university.

The New York Public Library has served us well over our lifetimes. It has offered enlightenment, education, and entertainment. It has nourished our minds and our souls. It has made us smarter, more interesting, and more involved citizens. It is our continuing education, for each of us, at every level of learning and it deserves our support.

New York Public Library "Alumni" Voice Their Support

In the past few months, The New York Public Library has received numerous letters from notable users in a variety of fields all of whom value the education they received (and continue to receive) from this institution. Below is a sampling of what some of these NYPL "alumni" have to say.

HISTORIANS, SCHOLARS, and CRITICS:

I owe most of my education to The New York Public Library. Starting with the Melrose branch in the Bronx, and then going on to the Fordham Road branch, my childhood was vastly enriched by The New York Public Library. I literally could not have had a career as a critic-scholar-teacher except for the Library. My debt to it is permanent and immense.
Harold Bloom, literary critic and scholar

The New York Public Library is a place that has never failed me. Every time I needed a crucial document Robert Moses’s Ph.D. Thesis; a long-lost manuscript of The Trail Drivers of Texas that told about Lyndon Johnson’s grandfather I found it there.
When I needed a sanctuary in which to work, it was there that I found it: I wrote The Power Broker in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room. I am only one of a thousand or ten thousand writers for whom the Library has always been there when we needed it.
Now the Library needs us all of us. And we must not fail it.
Robert Caro, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian

The New York Public Library is not only admired but deeply beloved, and I think that has to be because its great and civilizing message is so clear that education ennobles, and that learning is inextricably bound to the idea of the public realm. To read and to learn is to be raised up we make not only ourselves better, we make the life of the city better, too. That is what The New York Public Library, by its very existence, teaches us.
Paul Goldberger, architecture critic, The New Yorker

They were renovating the Schomburg library. The doors were locked but still lots of kids came after school let-out and sat on the steps as if recalling a time when they were welcome there for an after-school haven of safety and learning. Some of the kids wore keys around their necks, their only other choice was to return to an empty apartment. Others had to kill time until a parent picked them up after work. On the corner I watched a feral drug dealerhe was waiting. Don’t lock our branch library doors not if you care about what might become of kids. It could go either way.
Barbara Goldsmith, founding editor of New York Magazine, biographer, social historian, preservation activist

The New York Public Library is the noblest institution in our city. It is a grand agency for education, a wonderful repository of knowledge, a vital instrument of democracy. The Public Library is open to all readers; and, as Jefferson wrote Madison, &lsquo:A library book . . . is not, then, an article of mere consumption but fairly of capital, and often in the case of professional men, setting out in life, it is their only capital.’
Our history has been greatly shaped by people who had read their way in public libraries to opportunity and achievement. When we cut back on public libraries, we betray our national commitment to democracy and equal rights. The real losers are the poor of our city, the people who can’t afford to buy books, the people who need the knowledge books contain to enrich their lives as well as to give them a fair chance to make their way in the world. By cutting library budgets, we demean and diminish American democracy.
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Pultizer Prize-winning historian and scholar

While writing the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, I practically lived in The New York Public Library's Allen Room. It was an immense privilege to be plugged directly into one of the world's greatest treasure troves of information. Now it's under siege. Access has been curtailed for me and countless other citizens and scholars; acquisitions are imperiled and its great collections may languish. This is unacceptable. It's imperative that New Yorkers both demand a renewal of government support using our common wealth to bolster our public resources and tide them over with private assistance until government resumes its responsibilities.
Mike Wallace, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian

There have been times and very good times when the 42nd Street Library was my home away from home, both its grand Reading Room and its special collections. That such a treasure in the heart of Manhattan could be denied to people at any time grieves me (I experienced that recently). Open access! Too many treasures to be denied us!
Garry Wills, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award

JOURNALISTS:

I feel there could hardly be a more important educational facility in the world than The New York Public Library. When I die, I’ll be leaving them money in the meantime we have to try to help them with their Emergency Campaign so they can continue to do their incredibly important work.
Helen Gurley Brown, author and former Editor-in-Chief, Cosmopolitan

The satisfaction and solace which the Library brings is one of the oases of my world as an editor, writer, and publisher consumed by current affairs. To arrive on a day when the Library is closed is to feel cheated of one of the greatest treasures this city can offer, its learning. We must keep our libraries open every hour of the day we can to provide that refuge for thought for everyone.
Tina Brown, founding Editor, Talk and former Editor, The New Yorker and Vanity Fair

In many years as editor-in-chief of Newsweek, I relied on the Library for information not available in the magazine’s own extensive library. And in many years as chairman of the Citizens Committee for New York City, I have relied on the Library’s branches to spread the word about our services throughout the neighborhoods of New York!
Osborn Elliott, Chairman, Citizens Committee for New York City

An unimpaired New York Public Library is essential to the civilization of New York City and especially to the writers who depend upon it.
Jason Epstein, author, former Editorial Director, Random House, winner of the National Book Award for Lifetime Achievement

I genuflect every time I pass the junction of 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue. I have done that for forty years, out of respect for the accumulated wisdom for so long abundantly available to us all, and I do it now in prayerful hope that the justly celebrated generosity of Americans will come to the rescue of an essential institution so suddenly and sadly vulnerable in the city’s post-9/11 crisis. As a dependent of the Library, as a writer, and the publisher of many co-dependents, I suppose I have a special interest, but my overriding concern is to preserve the Library's gift to us all as the guardian of our cultural heritage, our learning, indeed our civilization.
Harold Evans, former President, Random House; Editorial Director, The Daily News and U.S. News & World Report; Editor, the (London) Sunday Times

I came to this country as a teenage refugee from Nazi-occupied Europe. The New York Public Library became my mentor in the English language, in history and literature and, over the years, in countless subjects of interest and importance to me. Its very existence is reassuring because it is always accessible. As a treasury of know-ledge it is limitless and priceless. A character in George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra speaks of the great library in Alexandria as the memory of mankind. The same can be said about The New York Public Library.
Henry Grunwald, Former Editor-in-Chief of Time Inc. and former Ambassador to Austria

Of all the institutions that make New York so exciting a place, The New York Public Library is the most precious to me, because its enormous wealth is free, accessible, and, above all, usable. And palpable! Unlike the collections in New York’s great museums, I can touch and hold most of the materials the Library holds. I can turn the pages, I can feel and smell them. You can’t get that sensual intimacy on the Internet! Since 1967, when I was working on my first book, I have gone to the NYPL to find everything from Gaelic words for the sea to the 1919 Michelin Guide to a particular World War I battlefield, and I have never been disappointed.
Robert MacNeil, journalist and former anchor of PBS’s News Hour

For me the Public Library IS New York. I love everything about it, from the lions out in front to the majesty of the reading room to the amazing collection of historic cookbooks and menus. It is an extraordinary resource, and one of the institutions that makes New York such a wonderful place to live.
Ruth Reichl, Editor-in-Chief, Gourmet magazine

ARCHITECTS, SCIENTISTS and BUSINESSMEN:

I arrived in New York City in March of 1949. I knew no one and I started calling on brokerage firms for a job. After the occasional interview I had nothing but time on my hands, but I did discover The New York Public Library. It was cold outside and warm in the Library and, of course, the time went by quickly because I was reading all day long. I will never forget what an oasis the Library was for me at that time in my life.
Alan C. Greenberg, Chairman, Bear Stearns & Co.

GREAT BUILDINGS are the heart of New York. But GREAT BOOKS are its soul. The New York Public Library is indispensable to the intellectual vitality of the city.
James Stewart Polshek, award-winning architect

Public librariesfrom the little local branch in the London neighborhood where I grew up, to the vast, redoubtable New York Public Libraryhave contributed far more to my own education than any school. For more than a century, the NYPL has been instrumental in making New York the vibrant, vital, literary city that it is, where education and discourse are accessible to all without charge and it is now at the forefront of providing broad access to 21sy century information technology. Each of us owes a huge debt to the NYPL, and, in these times of budget cuts, it is crucial that we support this great library, and libraries everywhere.
Oliver Sacks, M.D., neurologist and best-selling author

NOVELISTS, ESSAYISTS, and POETS:

Today it's called information; yesterday it was knowledge; centuries ago, wisdom. And yet all it amounts to are a few scratches on a more or less flat surface. These scratches and there are entire galaxies of them behind the three arches and two lions of The New York Public Library are the most precious thing mankind knows. How fragile the life of a book, how fragile a library, and how fragile the enduring miracle of human creativity. Who can be happier than those who, on beaming Manhattan mornings at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, after turning on their laptops, or uncapping their pens, or sharpening their pencils, know they're about to put down one or two scratches of their own?
André Aciman, essayist and memoirist

At the time I first came to New York, straight out of Berkeley, the 42nd Street library was my salvation, my sanity, my secret place I spent every weekend there, reading at random, despairing of ever learning everything there was to learn, finding order. To provide a place or order in the city is a gift that enriches beyond any possible cost.
Joan Didion, journalist, screenwriter, and novelist

One of the proudest moments of my life was when I was made a Literary Lion by The New York Public Library. It’s a thrill for me to walk into that magnificent building. I use the Library for research. I love the feeling of sitting in the Main Reading Room and watching people who love books as much as I do.
Dominick Dunne, novelist and journalist

The very first "novel" that I had ever read, Peter Pan, was checked out from the 125th Street branch when I was about eight or nine years old (in the late 1950s), my library card a passport to a much wider world than I had ever known. During the years that I worked full time for a transit ad agency on Fortieth Street and Madison Avenue, in the late 1970s and into the &lsquo:80s, I spent nearly every lunch hour at either the Mid-Manhattan branch or at The New York Public Library on 42nd Street just prowling around and, often enough, coming away with many a work of fiction and nonfiction to nurture my hunger for literature. (I read more books during those eight years than I did at any other time in my life, perhaps because the libraries were open nearly every day and so easily accessible to me.) But there is no period in my life when the library system has not been of an enormous help to me as a writer and human being.
Oscar Hijuelos, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist

Over the years, The New York Public Library has been my unofficial alma mater, and my intellectual mother. I have spent countless days at her bosom, using her for my research into my nonfiction books, articles, and novels. When I had the good fortune to be selected as one of the fellows at the Library’s Center for Scholars and Writers, I not only was able to complete vast amounts of research on my New York waterfront book, but could enjoy the privilege of visiting one of my favorite buildings six days a week. It ennobles all who come within its purview. If I had my wish as to where I would most like to be buried, it would be underneath the stacks of the NYPL.
Phillip Lopate, poet, essayist, and fiction writer

I give talks around the country and I often mention my love of The New York Public Library. It is love unreserved, unlimited, unalloyed. To think of the 42nd Street Library and its exquisite branches is to be elevated and comforted simultaneously. So anything I can do for the Library anything. My definition of heaven: the Reading Rooms (North and South) on the third floor.
Frank McCourt, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award

My job at The New York Public Library was lowly (it was long ago, and I was a college student): I was hired as a sub-page. My responsibility was to dust the big shiny tables in the Periodicals Room, but even the dust particles seemed sacral; they had, after all, alighted on Literature’s dwelling-place, and I knew that (in the guise of a sub-page) I had ascended to Paradise. The passing of decades has only intensified these feelings of gratitude, privilege, and bookish infatuation. The New York Public Library represents civilization at its most sublime: an open-hearted, democratic, universally accessible American zenith.
Cynthia Ozick, award-winning novelist

In my twenties, in the 20th century’s fifties, I spent many an afternoon in The New York Public Library, drowsing to the sound of the great waterwheel spilling books out at the call desk. It made me feel like a real New Yorker, and a potential learned person. The Library is one of the city’s sacred spaces, a treasure-house of literacy that deserves everyone’s support.
John Updike, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award

FINE AND PERFORMING ARTISTS:

I have used the public libraries at 42nd Street and the Muhlenberg on 23rd Street for many, many years, And I urge continuing support of all the libraries for many years to come.
Louise Bourgeois, abstract expressionist sculptor

If more people were educated about what the Library can do for them, we would not need to raise funds!
Bill Cosby, actor and comedian

One thing which distinguishes a great country and a great people over the passage of time is public access to the arts, to science, and to knowledge. In The New York Public Library, we have one of the most magnificent collections of books, music, lectures, children’s programs, and research materials available in New York City. FOR FREE.
As a "starving artist" when I first came to this often overwhelming city, the Library provided me with plays, with movies, and with valuable research material so that I could audition for the theatre. I still use the Library, and have now introduced my 4-year-old daughter to its wonderful children’s programs. The Library is one of the great traditions of New York and, I will go so far as saying, of America. Even when our elected officials donate more to missiles than to missives, the individual citizen must remain committed to what is truly great about our country. Free education! Public access! We must support one of our richest assets: Our minds.
Marcia Gay Harden, Academy Award-winning actress

The New York Public Library has been a place of inspiration for most of my adult life, both as a source of information and as a venue to read and plan. In addition, I have had at the Library a series of concerts with Eugenia Zukerman now approaching its 20th season.
Anthony Newman, harpsichord and organ virtuoso

The New York Public Library is the most unique and extraordinary resource of its kind in the world. I relish inhabiting the place for its energetic atmosphere, surprising and illuminating exhibits, and incredible wealth of material.
Harold Prince, Tony Award-winning director and producer and winner of the National Medal of Arts

To know that one’s contribution to the theatre and dance world is recorded forever at The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center is the greatest reward to me.
Donald Saddler, choreographer and winner of the TDF Astaire Award for Lifetime Achievement

54 years ago I was able to build a little house for my growing family, because I went to The New York Public Library and looked up L-O-G-C-A-B-I-N. Hooray for the NYPL!
Pete Seeger, Grammy Award-winning musician, song-writer and folklorist

I have lived in New York all my life that means that The New York Public Library has been a part of my education, my pleasure, my work. The Research Libraries have been my school and continue to be. I did not attend college; I am a grateful member of the "People’s University."
Marian Seldes, Tony- , Obie- , and Drama Desk Award-winning actress

As a kid, the public library was my escape route from humiliating afterschool baseball games where I'd always be the last picked. It became my home-away-from-home and homers, a safe-haven that led me into worlds of words and pictures by Franz Kafka, Peter Breugel, and thousands of other writers and artists . . . many of whom were probably as crummy at baseball as I was.
The public library is one of America's most generous and hospitable creations. Benjamin Franklin, the institution's inventor, is honored by having his face on our $100 dollar bills (the largest we print.) Not providing enough of those bills to allow our libraries to thrive leaves me apoplectic about our nation's priorities... and if you don't know what "apoplectic" means, get to a library while they're still around to help you find out!
Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize-winning illustrator, author, and cartoonist

Many of my theater, opera, and film projects have seeds and trees of inspiration from the research I was able to do at the Performing Arts and the Mid-Manhattan libraries. The Picture Collection is often the first stop in the development phase of a piece. From background research, to criticism, to images for sets and costumes, the Library has proven to be an invaluable asset in the process of creation. I have also enjoyed the honor of two exhibitions at the gallery of the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, which gave viewers an up-close opportunity to see the details of my work and the behind-the-scenes process.
Julie Taymor, film director, Tony Award-winning stage director, and puppetry artist

Without the aid of The New York Public Library I would not have known that my chosen vocation existed. A society without public libraries is doomed to spend its life in front of a mirror.
Lawrence Weiner, conceptual artist

All cities need centers, like in a medieval village, where people congregated in a cathedral for learning and inspiration. The Library as a center gives us a place where one can look at the past as well as gaining knowledge of the future. It gives a window to our community in New York as well as the entire world. Without such a center it is difficult for us to go forward.
Robert Wilson, experimental theatre and opera artist and director

5/5/03