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Founders Award Event - with Stephen Schwarzman and Richard Jenrette

The main building of the Charleston Library Society was completed in 1914, and to celebrate its 100th anniversary, the Board of Trustees is proud to inaugurate the Charleston Library Society Founders Award in April, 2014 with its first recipient, Richard Hampton Jenrette.

A dedicated classicist and an eloquent writer, Richard Hampton Jenrette has spent his life achieving excellence. His dedication and contributions to the preservation, scholarship and connoisseurship of American history as reflected in his founding of Classical American Homes Historic Trust, his extensive collection of Americana, and his noted published works and scholarship are almost unprecedented.

Mr. Jenrette's involvement in Charleston began with the restoration of the Mills House Hotel, followed by his work on the famed Roper House on East Battery. Mr. Jenrette helped to revitalize downtown Charleston, to enhance the city's reputation as a significant site for historic preservation, and to expose many high-profile figures to the Lowcountry. By graciously hosting Prince Charles after Hurricane Hugo devastated the peninsula, he brought national attention to the value of historic preservation and the decorative arts in Charleston. A journalist at heart, the beautiful books about his adventures with old homes are respected as much for their prose as they are for the exquisite photographs that catalog his preservation efforts.

Dick Jenrette has given the world elegance, refinement, and a standard of excellence to be admired forever. It is for this reason that the Charleston Library Society will now honor him with an annual lecture by someone who embodies the same cultural and intellectual ideals that define him and that inspired nineteen young men to establish the Society in 1748.

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Certainly, Steve Schwarzman fits this description. A brilliant undergrad at Yale who went on to get his MBA at Harvard after working a summer with Dick Jenrette, he has been profoundly successful in the business world. Inspired by his intellectual curiosity and deep desire to support the arts, he has chaired the board of the Kennedy Center, given generously to the NY Public Library, and in April, 2013 launched the Schwarzman Scholars program which will rival the famed Rhodes Scholars program at Oxford University.