At a panel discussion on Tuesday evening, E.L. Doctorow, Pete Hamill, and Cynthia Ozick graciously discussed New York in literature at NYU’s Fales Library in celebration of its 50th anniversary and Pete Hamill’s donation of his papers (Doctorow donated his to the library in 2001, and Ozick is a class of 1949 alumna.)

Cynthia Ozick was rather endearing and had plenty of nice library quotes. She read from her 1997 novel, The Puttermesser Papers. In describing an idyllic New York City, she writes, “The libraries are lit all night,” there is an increase in gardening and a decrease in crime, and “the bureau of venereal disease control has closed down.” She spoke of living in Pehlam Bay in the 1930s when it was a semirural community: “We didn’t have a library!” Instead, they had a green truck, and she recalled shouting, “The library is coming! The library is coming!”

Pete Hamill had a few jewels of his own. His newest novel, North River, out in June from Little, Brown, is set in 1930s New York. To explain his choice of time and place, he referred to his last novel, Forever, which he finished writing on September 10, 2001. He, owning up to its length, took another year to add in the events of 9/11 and cut something out—the Depression, an era he saved to tackle in his latest.

E.L. Doctorow early on declined to identify himself as a New York novelist: “New York does not confer literary identity.” For him, “If the time was hot in a certain place, that’s where the book was set.” To close with an interesting fact, he was named Edgar after Edgar Allen Poe, who he called “the greatest bad writer.” He asked his mother why he was named after an “alcoholic…delusional paranoid…with necrophiliac tendencies.” She was not amused.