Library Lions 2011 Honorees

Jonathan Franzen is the author of four novels, The Twenty-Seventh City, Strong Motion, The Corrections, and Freedom; a collection of essays, How to Be Alone; and a personal history, The Discomfort Zone. The Corrections won the National Book Award in 2011 and the James Tait Black award in 2003 and Freedom won the Heartland Prize and the John Gardner fiction prize. Mr. Franzen is also a regular contributor of journalism and essays to The New Yorker. His other honors include a Whiting Writers Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Berlin Prize, and election to the German Academy of the Arts. He lives in New York City and Santa Cruz, California.  

"Reading and writing fiction is a form of active social engagement, a way of being and becoming, and many of the books with which I've been in the deepest lifelong conversation have been borrowed from public libraries."

Tony Kushner’s plays include A Bright Room Called Day, Angels in America, Homebody/Kabul, Caroline, or Change, and The Intelligent Homosexual’s Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures. He wrote the
screenplays for Mike Nichols’s Angels In America and Steven Spielberg’s Munich. His books include Brundibar, with illustrations by Maurice Sendak, and Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Palestinian/Israeli Conflict. The recipient of many awards, in 2008, Kushner was the first recipient of the Steinberg Distinguished Playwright Award. 

"I've always loved libraries! I discovered Thurber, Wode-House, Cheever, Blake, Wordsworth, Kunitz, and Rukeyser browsing in libraries, as well as the first gay book I ever read, Andrew Tobias's The Best Little Boy in the World. I've taken some of my best naps in libraries and dreamed some of my weirdest dreams. And libraries are sexy, because everyone is there for books, which makes everyone in libraries hot!"

Ian Mcewan is the best-selling author of 13 books, including the novels Solar; On Chesil Beach; Saturday; Atonement, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the W. H. Smith Literary Award; The Comfort of Strangers and Black Dogs, both shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Amsterdam, winner of the Booker Prize; and The Child in Time, winner of the 2011 Jerusalem Prize; as well as the story collections First Love, Last Rites, winner of the Somerset Maugham Award, and In Between the Sheets. He lives in london.

"All writers start out as readers. I owe everything to a long-vanished little library for children on a British army base in Tripoli, Libya, in 1957. I was eight years old, and for the next three years those weekly borrowings set me day-dreaming. Since then I've remained convinced that the child who reads alone begins to take possession of an inner life."

Natalie Merchant began her musical career as the lead vocalist and lyricist of the pop music band 10,000 Maniacs, releasing two platinum and four gold records with the group between 1981 and 1993. In 1994, Merchant embarked on a solo career with a self-produced debut album, Tigerlily, which astounded the music industry by selling more than 5 million copies. In the following years, Merchant has released several best-selling albums, most recently in the spring of 2010, a double album entitled Leave Your Sleep. This thematic work included 26 musical adaptations of classic and contemporary poems that touch upon various aspects of childhood. Merchant drew from the works of Robert Louis Stevenson, E.E. Cummings, Robert Graves, Gerard Manley Hopkins, edward lear, rachel field, and Charles Causley. in addition to the album, Merchant published an 80-page book that included biographical sketches and portraits of each poet featured in the anthology.

"As a young girl, I spent countless hours between the shelves of my public library. I remember being absolutely overwhelmed by what they contained. It was my favorite place. I found the air in the library was easier to breathe and I loved the respectful quiet and the purposefulness of everyone inside. Even then, I was moved by how much I owed to strangers who felt compelled to construct such a beautiful building and fill it with all that treasure that was free to borrow."

Stacy Schiff's first book, Saint-Exupéry, was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize, and she received the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for her second, Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov). Schiff's A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America won the 2005 George Washington Book Prize. Her most recent book, Cleopatra: A Life, a #1 bestseller, was published to great acclaim last year. As The Wall Street Journal wrote, “Schiff does a rare thing: she gives us a book we'd miss if it didn't exist.” Ron Chernow may explain why: “Even if forced at gunpoint, Stacy Schiff would be incapable of writing a dull page or lame sentence.” Schiff has received Guggenheim Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowships, and was a fellow at The New York Public Library's Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. She was awarded a 2006 Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has written for The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, and The New York Times op-ed page. She lives in New York with her husband and three children.

"The library is the playground of the open mind. All we might care to know is there, along with what we might prefer not to know, and what others prefer we not know. My hometown librarian signalled as much when she ejected me from the adult reading room at the age of 8, creating a lifelong trespasser. Whatever Mrs. Toohey was guarding was plainly illicit. I wanted more."

Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, spent 15 years and interviewed more than 1,200 people for The Warmth of Other Suns, the epic story of three people who made the decision of their lives in what came to be known as the Great Migration. In conducting her research, Wilkerson raced against the clock to reach as many original migrants as she could find before it was too late. The result is the intimate, yet sweeping human story of people following their hearts and escaping the brutal caste system of the American south to find freedom within the borders of their own country. Isabel Wilkerson won the Pulitzer Prize in 1994 for her work as Chicago Bureau Chief of The New York Times. She was the first black woman in the history of American journalism to win a Pulitzer Prize and the first African-American to win for individual reporting in the history of American journalism.

"Libraries are so central to freedom that, well into the 20th century, certain Americans were forbidden by law to enter them throughout the American south. My parents grew up unable to take out a library book. They went north to Washington, D.C., where I was born. As soon as I learned how to read, they carried me to Petworth Library and got me the library card that they had been denied as children. I value libraries as much as freedom itself."