The author of The Heidi Chronicles and other plays was a longtime Library member, Wasserstein won a Tony Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
The following excerpt comes from addresses to Library trustees, staff and friends at an event launching the anniversary celebration on November 5, 2003.
I'm somebody who's never been able to write at home. So I started coming here after school to write high school English papers. When I graduated from college I came home and I was taking writing classes and I still couldn't work at home, so I found my way back here and began writing plays here. As time went on, I started writing in the rooms upstairs on the twelfth floor. So I actually wrote a lot of my play The Heidi Chronicles here, upstairs in this room that always looked like Dresden to me—there was a pipe with little peels and you look out the window at bricks, and I really thought to myself there's something wrong with me because I feel most calm in this room. If I went anywhere else, even my own apartment, it never worked as well as coming here and staring up at brick wall and hearing the water drip.
I've always been grateful to this Library not only for the research and the books but for being a place for a writer to find some sort of calm, and where you can come in and say "I'm a writer" and nobody looks at you like you're crazy or it's not a profession. They look at you and they give you the dignity of a wonderful place to write.