If Not For Libraries: Authors on the Importance of Public Libraries
Not surprisingly, writers are big believers in and boosters of libraries, often because they made a direct impact on their own lives. Below are just a few examples of authors who have spoken or written about their love of and gratitude for libraries and how these spaces and the people who work in them set them on the path to being a writer. We've also included a link to one of their works...which may not exist were it not for a library.
James Baldwin
"I went at least three or four times a week [135th Street branch of NYPL] and I read everything there. I mean, every single book in that library. In some blind and instinctive way, I knew that what was happening in those books was also happening all around me. And I was trying to make a connection between those books and the life I saw and the life I lived." (source)
Notes of a Native Son
by James Baldwin
Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, these essays capture a view of Black life and Black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained strength through the words of one of the most captivating essayists and foremost intellectuals of that era.
Barbara Kingsolver
"Books were a revelation to me always. I loved the library. We had a small public library in the town where I grew up….I would just sneak around and sort of hide in the stacks reading things and so this whole feeling of sort of these secret worlds I could enter was quite thrilling." (source)
The Poisonwood Bible
by Barbara Kingsolver
In 1959, Nathan Price, an evangelical Baptist who has taken his wife and four daughters on a mission to the Belgian Congo, finds that their traditions are no longer secure in this very different world, in a powerful story set against the backdrop of the Congo's battle for independence from Belgium.
Neil Gaiman
"When I was a boy...my parents would drop me at the local library on their way to work...In the beginning, I would head for the children’s library, in the back, open the card index, which listed books by subject, and explore ghosts or magic, time travel, or space. I would find a book I liked, and read everything by the author. I discovered that the librarians could, through the wonder of the interlibrary loan, get me books they did not have, and that they would. As far as the librarians were concerned, I was just another customer, and I was treated with a level of respect that I don’t recall getting anywhere else, even at school." (source)
America Gods
by Neil Gaiman
On the plane home to attend the funerals of his wife and best friend, Shadow, just released from prison, encounters Mr. Wednesday, an enigmatic stranger who seems to know a lot about him, and when Mr. Wednesday offers him a job as his bodyguard, Shadow accepts and is plunged into a dark and perilous world, where the soul of America is at stake
Amy Tan
"I read every fairy tale I could lay my hands on at the public library. It was a wonderful world to escape to. I say “escape” deliberately, because I look back and I feel that my childhood was filled with a lot of tensions in the house, and I was able to go to another place. These stories were also filled with their own kinds of dangers and tensions, but they weren’t mine. And they were usually solved in the end." (source)
The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan
Four Chinese women, drawn together by the shadow of their past, meet in San Francisco to play mah jong, invest in stocks, eat dim sum, and to "say" stories to each other. Nearly 40 years later, one of the women has died, and her daughter arrives to take her place. However, the daughter never expected to learn of her mother's secret lifelong wish—and the tragic way in which it has come true. The revelation creates among the women an urgent need to remember the past.
Angie Thomas
"Growing up, I was unable to travel because it was simply something my family couldn't afford. Books, however, allowed me to see that there was more to the world than my neighborhood. They saved my life in so many ways, and libraries were the only way I was able to access those books." (source)
The Hate U Give
by Angie Thomas
Starr Carter is constantly switching between two worlds: the poor, mostly black, neighborhood where she lives and the rich, mostly white, prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Now, facing pressures from all sides of the community, Starr must find her voice and stand up for what's right.
Ray Bradbury
“Libraries raised me. I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money. When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money. I couldn’t go to college, so I went to the library three days a week for 10 years.” (source)
Fahrenheit 451
by Ray Bradbury
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television "family." But then he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television. When Mildred attempts suicide and Clarisse suddenly disappears, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known. He starts hiding books in his home, and when his pilfering is discovered, the fireman has to run for his life.
Octavia Butler
"When I was six and was finally given books to read in school, I found them incredibly dull; they were Dick and Jane books. I asked my mother for a library card. I remember the surprised look on her face. She looked surprised and happy. She immediately took me to the library…From then on the library was my second home." (source)
Parable of the Sower
by Octavia Butler
In 2025 California, an eighteen-year-old African American woman, suffering from a hereditary trait that causes her to feel others' pain as well as her own, flees northward from her small community and its desperate savages.
Nikki Giovanni
"Libraries are important. You just always feel safe and warm and wanted in a library. It's just a wonderful feeling." (source)
A Library
by Nikki Giovanni; illustrated by Erin Robinson
In what other place can a child "sail their dreams" and "surf the rainbow" without ever leaving the room? This ode to libraries is a celebration for everyone who loves stories, from seasoned readers to those just learning to love words, and it will have kids and parents alike imagining where their library can take them. This inspiring read-aloud includes stunning illustrations and a note from Nikki Giovanni about the importance of libraries in her own childhood.
R. Eric Thomas
"My parents would take us to the library every week and they would let us borrow as many books as the library would allow which was 40. And then as I got older I would go to the library myself and it was a sanctuary and it was a space of endless possibility and there’s so many ways I feel that different forces in the world will tell you that there are no possibilities for you or there are limited possibilities. Your outcomes aren’t great, you know, because of your zip code, your race, your sexual orientation, your gender, your life. And the fact that I could walk into this space and open up a book and discover characters who were living lives that were just like mine and characters who were so drastically different than mine and know that they promised an escape, they also promised another way out, another universe." (source)
Kings of B'More
by R. Eric Thomas
Propelled by his best friend's impending move out of state and inspired by Ferris Bueller's Day Off, sixteen-year-old Harrison plans a farewell through Baltimore that includes a road trip, their first Pride, and a rooftop dance party.
Ursula Le Guin
"A library is a focal point, a sacred place to a community; and its sacredness is its accessibility, its publicness. It’s everybody’s place. I remember certain libraries, vividly and joyfully, as my libraries—elements of the best of my life." (source: The Wave in the Mind)
A Wizard of Earthsea
by Ursula Le Guin
A boy grows to manhood while attempting to subdue the evil he unleashed on the world as an apprentice to the Master Wizard.
Isaac Asimov
"I received the fundamentals of my education in school, but that was not enough. My real education, the super-structure, the details, the true architecture, I got out of the public library. For an impoverished child whose family could not afford to buy books, the library was the open door to wonder and achievement, and I can never be sufficiently grateful that I had the wit to charge through that door and make the most of it." (source: I, Asimov: A Memoir)
I, Robot
by Isaac Asimov
A classic collection of interlocking tales chronicles the near-future development of the robot and features models that have the ability to read minds, experience human emotions, and take over the world—and, perhaps, render humankind itself obsolete.