Almost as if you had fallen from the sky, your biography of aviator and writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery made such a splash, becoming a Pulitzer finalist, that it made people ask, “Where did this woman come from?” We knew the answer: Adams, Massachusetts, Williams College, and a successful but anonymous career in editing. Determined, like the Little Prince, to find the meaning below the surface, you unearthed in your inaugural book a story that brought to life not only a man but a t ime and a generation’s uneasy relationship with the technology that changed its world. Even The New Yorker said, “It’s impossible to imagine the job better done.” The challenge proved even greater with your next subject, Vera Nabokov, who had worked hard all her life to hide from the world behind a camouflage of plainness. However, in your Pulitzer-winning Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov): Portrait of a Marriage she emerges from this cocoon as beautiful and fully formed as the lepidoptera she and her husband chased across several continents. With the help of family friends and of personal correspondence that had eluded previous biographers you “succeeded,” according to The New York Times “in creating an elegantly nuanced portrait of the artist’s wife, showing us just how pivotal Nabokov’s marriage was to his hermetic existence and how it indelibly shaped his work.” Along the way, you managed to confirm a pivoral incident in 20th-century literature, Vera retrieving from the backyard fire where her husband had tossed it the manuscript of Lolita, saying to him firmly, “We are keeping this.” You have similarly saved Vera from an unjust obscuriry. Every literary figure should have so literary a biographer. In recognition of your distinguished achievement in literary biography, Williams College is proud to honor you with its Bicentennial Medal.