The New York Public Library remembers the life of Robert B. Silvers, editor of The New York Review of Books and member of the Library's Board of Trustees, who died March 20 at the age of 87. 

Silvers was honored as a Library Lion in 2014 with Margaret Atwood, Dave Eggers, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Anna Deavere Smith. In his Library Lions video, he spoke about the role of libraries.

Silvers had served on the Library's Board of Trustees since 1997. Max Palevsky created the Robert B. Silvers Lecture, an annual series at the Library in recognition of Silvers's work. The series features contemporary people whose fields correspond to the broad range of Silvers's interests in literature, the arts, politics, economics, history, and the sciences.

The Library acquired the archive of The New York Review of Books in 2015. The archive includes a wealth of correspondence between Silvers and Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky, and Oliver Sacks, including personal letters from Sacks to Silvers emphasizing how important Silvers’s encouragement and editing was to Sacks's development as a writer. The archive of The New York Review of Books was acquired through the generosity of Roger Alcaly and Helen Bodian.