New York Public Library - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

The historian David McCullough has described the New York Public Library as one of the five most important libraries in the United States, the others being the Library of Congress, the Boston Public Library, and the university libraries of Harvard and Yale.

Film

• The NYPL has appeared in feature films. It serves as the backdrop for a central plot development in the 2002 film Spider-Man and a location in the 2004 apocalyptic science fiction film The Day After Tomorrow. In the 1978 film, The Wiz, Dorothy and Toto stumble across it, one of its lions comes to life, and joins them on their journey out of Oz.
• It is also featured prominently in the 1984 film Ghostbusters with three of the titular protagonists encountering the ghost of a librarian named Eleanor Twitty, who becomes violent when approached. Her origins and the library's prominent standing are explored in the video game sequel, Ghostbusters: The Video Game. In May 2010, the library invited comedy group Improv Everywhere to put on a brief performance in the main reading room based on ghostbusters as a promotional stunt.
• Other films in which the library appears include 42nd Street (1933), Portrait of Jennie (1948), Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961), You're a Big Boy Now (1966), A Boy Named Charlie Brown (1969), Beneath the Planet of the Apes (1970), Chapter Two (1979), Escape from New York (1981), Prizzi's Honor (1985), Regarding Henry (1991), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), The Time Machine (2002), and Sex and the City (2008).
• A thinly disguised NYPL is the employer of a librarian with access to many mythical objects imparting magical powers for fighting evil in a series of films starring Noah Wyle. The first of the series is The Librarian: Quest for the Spear.

Television

• It was in the pilot episode of the ABC series Traveler as the Drexler Museum of Art.
• The animated television series Futurama has Fry confronting a giant brain there in the episode "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid".
• In an episode of Seinfeld, Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards) dates an NYPL librarian, Jerry Seinfeld is accosted by a library cop (Philip Baker Hall) for late fees, and George Costanza (Jason Alexander) encounters his high school gym teacher living homeless on its steps.
• It is the setting for much of "The Persistence of Memory", the eleventh part of Carl Sagan's Cosmos TV series.

Literature

• Lynne Sharon Schwartz's The Writing on the Wall (2005) features a language researcher at NYPL who grapples with her past following the September 11, 2001, attacks.
• Cynthia Ozick's 2004 novel Heir to the Glimmering World, set just prior to World War II, involves a refugee-scholar from Hitler's Germany researching the Karaite Jews at NYPL.
• In the 1996 novel Contest by Matthew Reilly, the NYPL is the setting for an intergalactic gladiatorial fight that results in the building's total destruction.
• In the 1984 murder mystery by Jane Smiley, Duplicate Keys, an NYPL librarian stumbles on two dead bodies, c. 1930.
• In Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, the main character visits the NYPL to look up her condition in the dictionary.
• Allen Kurzweil's The Grand Complication is the story of an NYPL librarian whose research skills are put to work finding a missing museum object.
• Lawrence Blochman's 1942 mystery Death Walks in Marble Halls features a murder committed using a brass spindle from a catalog drawer.
• 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).
• Linda Fairstein's Lethal Legacy (2009) is mainly centered around the library.
• Laura Ruby's The Chaos King centers around the library.

• Smaller mentions of the library can be found in:
  • Henry Sydnor Harrison's V.V.'s Eyes (1913)
  • P. G. Wodehouse's A Damsel in Distress (1919)
  • Christopher Morley's short story "Owd Bob" in his humor book Mince Pie (1919)
  • James Baldwin's Go Tell It On the Mountain (1953)
  • Bernard Malamud's short story "The German Refugee" (in his Complete Stories ; originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in 1963)
  • Stephen King's Firestarter (1980)
  • Beatrice Joy Chute's The Good Woman (1986)
  • Sarah Schulman's Girls, Visions and Everything (1986)
  • Isaac Bashevis Singer's posthumous Shadows on the Hudson (1998)

Poetry

Both branches and the central building have been immortalized in numerous poems, including:

• Richard Eberhart's "Reading Room, The New York Public Library" (in his Collected Poems, 1930–1986 )
• Arthur Guiterman's "The Book Line; Rivington Street Branch, New York Public Library" (in his Ballads of Old New York )
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Library Scene, Manhattan" (in his How to Paint Sunlight )
• Muriel Rukeyser's "Nuns in the Wind" (in The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser )
• Paul Blackburn's "Graffiti" (in The Collected Poems of Paul Blackburn )
• E.B. White's "Reading Room" (Poems and Sketches of E.B. White )
• Susan Thomas' "New York Public Library" (the anthology American Diaspora )
• Aaron Zeitlin's poem about going to the library, included in his 2-volume Ale lider un poemes (1967 and 1970)

Other

• 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.
• A replica of the library is also featured in Universal Studios Singapore and Universal Studios Florida