It shouldn’t be a surprise that most writers discovered the wealth that is contained in books at their local library . . . when they were kids.

Yet I am always surprised when someone like Frank McCourt writers with such deep emotion about his first acquaintance with these public places where information, knowledge, and stories are valued, stored, and shared . . . freely and free.

Joyce Carol Oates is the latest to talk about libraries. Over the decades, she’s written a continuous stream of short stories and novels, three of her novels receiving the prestigious National Book Award.

In the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine, Oates writes about home. And home for her, as she defines it, is Lockport and the area around it in upper New York state . . . where Oates was born 71 years ago and where she grew up . . . and where she discovered books and libraries. Here’s that section of the Smithsonian story:

As in a vivid and hallucinatory dream, I am being taken by my grandmother Blanche Woodside – my hand in hers – to the Lockport Public Library on East Avenue, Lockport. I am an eager child of 7 or 8 and this is in the mid-1940s. The library is a beautiful building like no other I’ve seen close up, an anomaly in this city block beside the dull red brick of the YMCA to one side and a dentist’s office to the other; across the street is Lockport High School, another older, dull-brick building. The library – which, at my young age, I could not have known was a WPA-sponsored project that transformed the city of Lockport – has something of the look of a Greek temple; not only is its architecture distinctive, with elegantly ascending steps, a portico and four columns, a facade with six large, rounded, latticed windows and, on top, a kind of spire, but the building is set back from the street behind a wrought-iron fence with a gate, amid a very green jewel-like lawn.

The library for grown-ups is upstairs, beyond a dauntingly wide and high-ceilinged doorway; the library for children is more accessible, downstairs and to the right. Inside this cheery, brightly lit space there is an inexpressible smell of floor polish, library paste, books – that particular library smell that conflates, in my memory, with the classroom smell of floor polish, chalk dust, books so deeply imprinted in my memory. For even as a young child I was a lover of books and of the spaces in which, as indeed in a sacred temple, books might safely reside.

What is most striking in the children’s library are the shelves and shelves of books – bookcases lining the walls – books with brightly colored spines – astonishing to a little girl whose family lives in a farmhouse in the country where books are almost wholly unknown. That these books are available for children – for a child like me – all these books! – leaves me dazed, dazzled.

The special surprise of this memorable day is that my grandmother has arranged for me to be given a library card, so that I can “withdraw” books from this library – though I’m not a resident of Lockport, nor even of Niagara County. Since my grandmother is a resident, some magical provision has been made to include me.

The Lockport Public Library has been an illumination in my life. In that dimension of the soul in which time is collapsed and the past is contemporaneous with the present, it still is. Growing up in a not-very-prosperous rural community lacking a common cultural or aesthetic tradition, in the aftermath of the Great Depression in which people like my family and relatives worked, worked and worked – and had little time for reading more than newspapers—I was mesmerized by books and by what might be called “the life of the mind”: the life that was not manual labor, or housework, but seemed in its specialness to transcend these activities.

As a farm girl, even when I was quite young I had my “farm chores” – but I had time also to be alone, to explore the fields, woods and creek side. And to read.

There was no greater happiness for me than to read – children’s books at first, then “young adult” – and beyond. No greater happiness than to make my way along the seemingly infinite shelves of books in the Lockport Public Library, drawing my forefinger across the spines.

Thank you, Joyce Carol Oates, for this reminder of the wonder and joy that is to be had at the library.

You can read the rest of her “Going Home Again” story in the March issue of Smithsonian. Here’s the link to the online edition.

Tomorrow: The Ghost With No Name