New York Public Library Main Branch - in Literature and Poetry

In Literature and Poetry

The Library also appears in literature. Lynne Sharon Schwartz's Writing on the Wall (2005) features a language researcher at NYPL who grapples with her past following the September 11 attacks. Cynthia Ozick's novel Heir to the Glimmering World (2004) set just prior to World War II, involves a scholar who has fled from Nazi Germany researching the Karaite Jews at NYPL. Matthew Reilly's novel Contest (1996) sets an intergalactic gladiatorial fight in the NYPL, resulting in the building's total destruction. Jerome Badanes' novel The Final Opus of Leon Solomon (1985) is based on the real-life tragedy of an impoverished scholar who stole books from the Jewish Division of the Library, only to be caught and commit suicide. A lightly fictionalized portrait of the Jewish Division's first chief, Abraham Solomon Freidus, is found in a chapter of Abraham Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917).

Lawrence Blochman's Death Walks in Marble Halls (1942) features a murder committed using a brass spindle from a catalog drawer. Jane Smiley's Duplicate Keys (1984), also a murder mystery, featured an NYPL librarian who stumbles upon two bodies of people who died in 1930. Allen Kurzweil's novel The Grand Complication (2001) is the story of an NYPL librarian whose research skills are put to work finding a missing museum object. Donna Hill, who was herself an NYPL librarian in the 1950s, set her novel Catch a Brass Canary (1965) at an NYPL branch library.

Several poems involve the Library, including E. B. White's "A Library Lion Speaks" and "Reading Room" in Poems and Sketches of E.B. White (1981); Richard Eberhart's "Reading Room, The New York Public Library," in Collected Poems, 1930-1986 (1988); and Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Library Scene, Manhattan," in How to Paint Sunlight (2001). Excerpts from several of the many memoirs and essays mentioning the New York Public Library are included in the anthology Reading Rooms (1991), including reminiscences by Alfred Kazin, Henry Miller, and Kate Simon.