On the wall of the Trustees Room in the main branch of the New York Public Library, a quote by Thomas Jefferson reads: “I look to the diffusion of light and education as the resource most to be relied on for ameliorating the condition, promoting the virtue and advancing the happiness of man.” The diffusion of light and education is a good description of the Helen Bernstein Book Award for Excellence in Journalism, which recognizes a journalist whose work brings insight into important issues or policies.

Last week, a staff writer for the New Yorker, George Packer, won the Bernstein Award for his book “The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Jonathan Galassi and Jeffrey Seroy of FSG were in the audience. Another author from that publishing house, Tom Wolfe, gave the Jefferson Lecture in Washington, D.C., later that night.

Library officials were delighted to learn that Mr. Packer researched a good portion of the book in the Reading Room of the Library. Mr. Packer also has another reason to celebrate. He and Laura Secor, a former senior editor at Lingua Franca, are going to be married later this month in Brooklyn.

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SMART PARTY The 2006 Guggenheim Fellows were honored last week at a reception where previous fellows from 1946, 1956, 1966, 1976, 1986, and 1996 were invited.

In attendance was New York University chairman of the German department, Ulrich Baer, who is studying the representation of clouds and the art of sublimation from 1800 to 1970. He is looking at four pairs of creative artists, writers, and thinkers: Goethe and Casper David Friedrich; John Ruskin and Turner; Baudelaire and Eugene Boudin; and Rilke and Cézanne.

Also attending was Emory University professor Ronald Schuchard, who is at work on a complete edition of the prose of Nobel Prize winning author T.S. Eliot. The Knickerbocker asked what prose of Eliot’s was most elusive to track down. He said Eliot twice mentions in the Criterion,a quarterly he edited from 1922–1939, that an essay he wrote on English translator and dramatist George Chapman was forthcoming. But it never appeared.

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ADLER ACCOUNT The Stella Adler Studio of Acting hosted the Harold Clurman Festival of the Arts.At a panel that included Elaine Stritch, Zoe Caldwell, and Lois Smith, actor Roy Scheider recalled the time he performed in O’Neill’s “Long Day’s Journey into Night” in Japan.The director was Clurman who told them not to read the play nor see the movie nor read about it in advance. The actors disobeyed, however.Then when they arrived in Japan,his first directions were for all the actors to sit in a hotel suite and read the play aloud. They did that for three days, after which Clurman advised them, “Now, block it out.”

While the show was in previews, Clurman told Mr.Scheider,”You’re boring me.” At first Mr. Scheider was embarrassed, but the next day he decided that where he had been loud, he would speak softly, and where he had spoken softly, he would speak loud. After that performance, Clurman said, “See, I told you 90% of directing is casting.”

Once Clurman groaned that he and the Group Theater were $10,000 in debt. Stella Adler quipped, “A man of your talent and stature should be $100,000 in debt!”

Later that weekend, admiration prevailed at a symposium on Harold Clurman’s effect on playwrights. John Guare described Clurman, a founder of the Group Theater, as someone in whom art, reality, and dreams coalesced.

Israel Horovitz, who was introduced as having written 50 plays, elicited a mock incredulous response from Edward Albee, who announced that he has by comparison a paltry 27 plays to his name. Mr. Horovitz self-deprecatingly quipped, “I’ve written the same play fifty times.”

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The Knickerbocker received this report on Saturday:

SUN ENGAGEMENT
By R.H. SAGER and E.F. GITTER
Special to the Sun

CHARLESTON, S.C. — A former New York Sun editorial features editor, R.H. Sager and a former Sun features editor Emily Gitter were engaged to be married yesterday evening, at approximately 6:30 p.m.

Present at the proposal were a horse named Elvis and Whitney, his driver, a resident of Charleston.

Mr. Sager and Ms. Gitter met in the newsroom of the New York Sun.

The union is a first for the Sun, the nation’s fastest growing daily newspaper.

“I couldn’t be happier,” Mr. Sager told the Sun, reached for comment in Charleston. He added: “Though she probably could have done better.”

Elvis declined to comment.