When the Irish writer Joseph O’Connor was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, he would bring his 5-year-old son into the Center’s offices on weekends, to read while he worked on his novel. One day, as Mr. O’Connor recalls in a poem about his year in New York, his son wandered into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, which he found filled with a quantity and selection of juices and sodas he had never seen before. “Dad!” he yelled. “We’re rich!”

This story has become a favorite at the Center for Scholars and Writers — expressing, with a child’s directness, the sense of bounty that the fellows themselves feel in their time at the Center. Besides a $50,000 stipend for nine months, an office at the library, time and freedom to work, and the generous quantity of free beverages, the 15 scholars and creative writers chosen every year get a community of other academic and literary superstars with whom to trade ideas, and from whom to seek advice in moments of doubt. The privileges are so great and the intellectual level so high that it might be easy to see the Center as something like a gated scholars’ paradise. But, under the current director, Jean Strouse, the Center is making increasing efforts to share its wealth with the world beyond the library’s walls.

Ms. Strouse took over in 2003 from the first director, the historian Peter Gay. The Center, which opened in 1999, was the brainchild of Robert Darnton, a historian at Princeton and a library trustee, and Paul LeClerc, the library’s president. “The idea was for something like the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, for people who needed to use the library’s resources,” Ms. Strouse said recently. Mr. LeClerc approached Dorothy Cullman, who with her husband was already a major library patron, having supported the renovation of the Performing Arts Library at Lincoln Center and the creation of the Science, Industry, and Business Library on 34th Street. The Cullmans gave $10 million toward the founding of the Center. It was Mrs. Cullman’s suggestion that the fellowship be open to creative writers, as well as scholars – a mix that gives it its unique personality.

Although Ms. Strouse says she “inherited something that was really a great place and working very well,” she has made a couple of significant changes. One has been to expand the amount of public programming, with conversations on topics like the relationship between science and literature, and the changing face of Harlem. The Center recently added a staff member, Elizabeth Bradley, to run the public programs.

The other major change is the addition of a substantial educational component to the Center: During July, when the Center used to be empty – the fellowship technically ends in May, and Ms. Strouse said she has to get the fellows out of their offices “with a crowbar” in June — former fellows now teach week-long seminars for high-school English teachers. Topics have included Melville (taught by the Melville biographer Andrew Delbanco), the sonnet (by the poet Jill McDonaugh), and the fantastic in literature (by the novelist Donald Antrim). “The purpose is not to teach them how to teach,” Ms. Strouse said. “It’s to give them a week with a practicing writer and just recharge their batteries — give them an experience of pure intellectual fun, and introduce them to the resources of the library.” The program is run by a children’s book author and teacher, Sam Swope.

The success of the seminars, which began in 2004, led to the Center’s hosting field trips to the library for high school students. The trips are planned around topics the students have been studying, like Charles Dickens and Victorian childhood, or “The Gangs of New York.” The day begins with a talk by a fellow, followed by a pizza lunch. In the afternoon, members of the library staff lead the students in research projects designed to introduce them to the library’s collections. On a recent afternoon, for instance, a curator in the map division asked students from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music & Art and Performing Arts, who had been reading “The Catcher in the Rye,” to trace Holden Caulfield’s itinerary on a 1950’s map of Manhattan.

The richness of the collections – in historical maps and much else – is the pretext for the Center’s existence, and crucial for most of the fellows’ work. The application process is highly competitive, and the selection is done by two outside committees: a reviewing committee that winnows the pool of applicants down to 30 or 35, and a selection committee, representing seven different fields, that reads these applications and makes the final decisions. There is no set quota for academics or creative writers. This year, for instance, there are eight academics, two novelists, a playwright, a poet, a cartoonist, and two independent scholars.

The standard for an applicant’s need for access to the collections is higher for academics than for creative writers. The playwright Will Eno, for instance, won a fellowship with a proposal that he would search the library’s records for the traces of a family whose line died out, then write a play about them. Other projects are more sharply focused and archive-based. A history professor at Princeton, Sean Wilentz, is writing a study of the mid-20thcentury liberal historians Richard Hofstadter, C. Vann Woodward, and Arthur Schlesinger. A young British historian at the University of Virginia, Maya Jasanoff, is writing a book about the diaspora of American Loyalists to other parts of the British Empire after the Revolution.

And some projects are truly unique in their combination of historical and personal narrative: Nelson Alexander Smith, a freelance nonfiction writer, is writing an essay about the tenement on East 29th Street where he has lived for the last 20 years, which will include both the social history of socalled “dumbbell” tenements (the most common structure built in New York between 1879 and 1901, when they were outlawed) and a history of the building’s residents, including the late superintendent, a lesbian who had been in street gangs and gone to prison. Mr. Smith said of his essay, “It folds in a lot of things: the history of sanitation, the history of real estate, 1950’s lesbian pulp fiction.”

For someone like Mr. Nelson, who is not an academic with a department of colleagues, being part of a community for a year is a wonderful thing. Nathan Englander, who was a fellow in 2004-2005 and whose novel, “The Ministry of Special Cases,” is coming out this spring, said his time at the Center was a welcome break from his usual routine. “It was the right year to have to say hello to people and remember to change your clothes,” he said.

The Center’s physical home – 5000 elegant square feet on the second floor of the Humanities and Social Sciences Library on Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street – is designed to encourage socializing and discussion. There are 15 offices in a ring around a generous central space, which holds a large conference table, several sofas and chairs, and a smaller lunch table near the kitchen. (The offices aren’t sound-proof, and there is occasionally some conflict between those who enjoy hour-long lunch conversations and those trying to work.) Next door to the offices is a large public room called the Margaret Liebman Berger Forum, where, on Wednesdays, over a catered lunch, the Fellows give talks on their research to their peers and other invited guests. At a recent talk by Ms. Jasanoff, for instance, the guests included other historians, journalists, and book editors, as well as Mr. Gay. The Fellows themselves invite friends and colleagues, and Ms. Strouse also issues invitations, with an eye to helping the Fellows make new professional contacts. “Sometimes I can invite people to the lunch talks who will be useful to them – an editor or a book reviewer,” she said. “I’m sort of trying to think about that.”

For the academics, many of whom write for a popular audience, the insight and perspective of the creative writers can be very helpful. Ms. Strouse recalled sitting next to Mr. Englander at a lunch talk given by a Princeton professor, Stephen Kotkin, who was working on a history of the Ob River valley in Siberia. Mr. Kotkin had a vast amount of material — “It would be like writing about the Mississippi River Valley, except that the Ob River history is much longer than American history,” Ms. Strouse said – and he confessed that he was still unsure how to structure the narrative. “And Nathan whispered to me, ‘I know how he should structure it!'” Ms. Strouse remembered. “He went into his office afterward, and they talked for about four hours.”

Mr. Englander expressed fond recollections of his interactions at the Center, but also evinced a lighthearted refusal to take his own role too seriously. “Mostly, I think the fiction writers are very happy to have heat and some financial support while they’re trying to finish their novel,” he said, laughing. “But the high-minded thing about exchanging ideas, it really works there.”

These days, many of the fellows enjoy alternating their long hours of research and writing with giving talks to students. “It’s great to feel that something you’re doing has an impact beyond the small number of people who read your books,” Farah Jasmine Griffin, an English professor at Columbia, said. Ms. Griffin is teaching one of the seminars this summer, on African-American literature of migration. The other seminar, on contemporary Latin-American and Latino literature, will be taught by Carmen Boullosa, a Fellow from 2001-2002.

The Center’s education program continues to expand. Besides the summer seminars and class visits, Mr. Swope is experimenting with holding professional development days for teachers at the library – to replace the professional development days organized by schools themselves, which, he said, many teachers find overly programmatic and dull. The Center held a professional development day last fall on Election Day for about 60 teachers from Manhattan public schools. It was a condensed version of the summer programs, with a 90-minute seminar led by a Fellow, followed by a tour of the library, an introduction to the online databases, and an opportunity to do primary research. “They were just blown away,” Mr. Swope said. “They said, ‘Why can’t all professional development be like this?'” Although the logistics are tricky, Mr. Swope hopes to organize another professional development day for later this month. “We’re still feeling our way with these professional developments, but there certainly is a need for it, and the teachers like it, so we want to do more,” he said.

After eight years, the Center for Scholars and Writers is growing into a substantial public role. Its endowment, at $20 million, is healthy, though Ms. Strouse said she wants to raise money to increase the stipend for Fellows, which hasn’t increased since 1999. “Other parallel institutions are [raising money],” she said. “They are all trying to increase their stipends, and we have to stay competitive. And the cost of living in New York is so high.” As an independent scholar who has written biographies of J.P. Morgan and Alice James, Ms. Strouse said she has enjoyed becoming a “manager,” and being part of a complex institution like the library.

For many of the Fellows, having a temporary home in that institution is the most exciting part of the fellowship. Although the scholars are technically supposed to leave by nine, some stretch the rules. “I closed the place so many nights,” Mr. Englander said. “I would just work later and later. My favorite part was that, if you’re leaving at, let’s say, 10 o’clock,” he said – in a tone that suggested he meant later – “I would go to the wall and turn off 20 switches. It was just fun to be like, ‘I think I’ll turn off the library and go home.'”