Bill Goldstein testifies on research libraries

Good afternoon.

My name is Bill Goldstein.

I'm a writer and a lifelong New Yorker, born in Brooklyn, and now I live in Manhattan.

I'm here to speak about how vital the research libraries of the New York Public Library have been to me and my work, which would not have been possible without the astounding archival material

available at the New York Public Library and the generous professionalism of the librarians and curators who guard and protect the material on paper and in every medium that reveals the past and the roots of the present and the future.

I did most of the research for my first book, The World Broke in Two, Virginia Woolf, T.S.

Eliot, D.H.

Lawrence, and E.M.

Forster, and The Year That Changed Literature, a literary history of the year 1922 at the New York Public Library, and I'm now working on a biography of the writer and AIDS activist Larry Kramer,

again using many archives at the library, including the papers of the two organizations of which he was a co-founder, Gay Men's Health Crisis and ACT UP, AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power.

The library has helped make both books possible and preserves history in a way I think most New Yorkers don't know.

I do a segment about books on NBC.

weekend today in New York, and when The World Broken 2 was published in 2017, I did a segment with the anchor, Pat Battle, about it, and we talked about the research I did at NYPL.

Pat, and presumably most, if not all, viewers, had no idea that Virginia Woolf's diaries, for example, are in the middle of Midtown Manhattan, that the manuscript of Eliot's landmark poem, The Wasteland, is here.

The library preserves the stories of those famous English writers, among others, but also papers preserving the lives and histories of many LGBTQ activists, lesser known than Larry Kramer,

but as important, some of whom died decades ago of AIDS.

That the library makes it all accessible to the general public is an essential service to the people of New York.

Writers and researchers are then able to make this history known in our small way to the world.

I went to New York City public schools and got my PhD in English at the CUNY Graduate Center.

The research libraries are another public resource that has made me who I am today as a person and that enables me to write and to make a living.

So when Dr.

Williams asked the question about how much of the library is used by the general public and then by scholars and researchers, the scholars and researchers are the general public.

Are part of it, so it has made it possible for me to be a writer in New York and to make a living.