Ralph Pickett was a professor at NYU at the School of Education and a generous donor to the Bobst Library. He had established in his name a special fund for the purchase of books the library would not normally have acquired, such as the Supplementum Hellenisticum and the full set of Migne's Patrologiae Latinae. He was also the author of numerous works of fiction, most of which remain unpublished, which, as Pickett describes in a letter to Frank Walker, then librarian at Fales, "...indicate the range of my interests and foibles - campus life, oddities in the law, mystery and detective stories, historical novels, and the bizzare, outre, arcane and screwball aspects of fellow humans. Some are pretty grim; one, "The Newest Nation", is bitterly satirical. A few are placid."