An Essay for the Free Library of Philadelphia by Kurt Vonnegut

My favorite Founding Father is Benjamin Franklin. Anybody who tried to outlaw slavery at the Constitutional Convention, and then wrote an essay on flatulence, and then flew a kite in a thunderstorm, is my kind of guy.

He is said to have spent two hours a day studying in a library here in Philadelphia, a library he himself had founded.

My first American ancestors came to the Middle West from the north of Germany one or two decades before the Civil War. They wished to be defined by the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, and to get rich, if possible. They were literate, and had surely read POOR RICHARD'S ALMANAC. I do not doubt that they could quote poor Richard to this extent at least, and maybe in both English and German: "God helps them that help themselves."

They too would find public libraries, of which I stand before you as a beneficiary.

I am essentially self-taught, as are many, if not most of you, no matter what academic degrees you hold. My intellect has been largely shaped by books not assigned by any teacher, books praised by friends or relatives, or come upon accidentally. When I was a boy, many marvelous books, and some clunkers, too, were recommended by, hey presto, librarians.

Librarians, incidentally, not usually throught of as war-like personalities, have again and again been our bravest defenders of the First Amendment. All over this country in recent times, librarians, when told by locally powerful persons to remove this or that book from their shelves, have said, "Go jump in the lake, Buster -- this is the US of A," or words to that effect.

Like my American ancestors, and like yours, surely, or you wouldn't be here, I have been a supporter of the local public library wherever I've lived -- Indianapolis, Schenectady, Cape Cod, Iowa City, New York City, Bridgehampton, Long Island. The library in every community is our nation at its most Utopian -- important, welcoming, nurturing, democratic, and justly optimistic.

It is in our libraries that persons of every class or race or age have discovered the wisdom and beauth of the ages, and of the present as well, and have made them, like Benjamin Franklin, son of a candlemaker, parts of their own souls and intellects.

The lintel over the doorway of every library should be inscribed with these words: "God helps them that help themselves. Help yourself here."