is honored to announce
the recipient of the
Marfield Prize
for outstanding writing
about the arts in 2018.
Susan Orlean
author of
“The Library Book”
On April 29, 1986 the Los Angeles Public Library burned
for more than seven hours destroying and damaging more than a million books.
“At first, the smoke in the Fiction stacks was as pale as onionskin. Then it deepened to dove gray. Then it turned black. It wound around Fiction A through L, curling in lazy ringlets. It gathered into soft puffs that bobbed and banked against the shelves like bumper cars. Suddenly, sharp fingers of flames shot through the smoke and jabbed upward. More flames erupted. The heat built. The temperature reached 451 degrees and the books began smoldering. Their covers burst like popcorn. Pages flared and blackened and then sprang away from their bindings, a ream of sooty scraps soaring in the updraft. The fire flashed through Fiction, consuming as it traveled. It reached for the cookbooks. The cookbooks roasted. The fire scrambled to the sixth tier and then to the seventh. Every book in its path bloomed with flame.”
Susan Orlean with Grace Cavalieri at the Library of Congress
Susan Orlean has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992. She is the author of seven books, including Rin Tin Tin, Saturday Night, and The Orchid Thief, which was made into the Academy Award–winning film Adaptation. She lives with her family and her animals in Los Angeles and upstate New York and may be reached at SusanOrlean.com and @SusanOrlean.
The Marfield Prize or the National Award for Arts Writing is given annually by the Arts Club of Washington to the author of a nonfiction book about the visual, literary, media, or performing arts. Established to generate broader interest in the arts among general readers, the award celebrates prose that is clear, eloquent and inspiring, creating a strong connection with the arts and artists. Books are judged by a distinguished independent panel of judges. First given in 2006, the prize's endowment was established by a devoted and generous Arts Club member Jeannie S. Marfield.
The Marfield Judges
“Susan Orlean’s THE LIBRARY BOOK is lively and captivating and something of a library itself, packed with intersecting layers of stories, anecdotes and facts. But my favorite thing about it is the way that Orlean taps into a piece of my emotional life that I’d never truly examined: the private but communal feeling of almost familial affection that I feel whenever I walk into a library, a hushed sense of possibility and joy that dates back to the earliest years of my literacy.”
Carolyn Parkhurst
New York Times Bestselling author
“Susan Orlean’s THE LIBRARY BOOK is both a history and an homage to the public library in the United States. Orlean deftly weaves together the particular history of a devastating 1986 fire at the Los Angeles Public Library with the larger story of how Americans came to love and depend on one of this country’s most resilient social institutions. Her account is also a deeply personal love affair, not just with public libraries, but with the written word and the printed book.”
Philip Kennicott
Pulitzer Prize winner and Art and Architecture critic at the Washington Post
“THE LIBRARY BOOK is brilliant as a study of an institution and a city—brilliant as anthropology, and brilliant for the care and archeological perspicuity with which it excavates the entire built complex surrounding a cataclysmic civic event. It is just as brilliant for its narrative verve and tension, the companionability of its excellent prose, and for its wry, alert sympathy for and insight into human beings.”
Vijay Seshadri
Pulitzer Prize winning Poet