Born in Scituate in 1901, Gordon is the director of several firms, including the Allen Group, Inc., the Carnation Co. and the Commercial Credit Co. He also holds down trusteeships of the national board of the YMCA and the Roxbury Latin School in Boston.

Gordon's citation reads, "Harvard hails a signally generous son, a business leader who sets a swift pace, exemplar of a quick mind in a sound body."

Sir Richard W. Southern is a noted historian of the Middle Ages, and his books have received world-wide recognition for the quality of their scholarship.

Born in 1912 and educated at Oxford's Balliol College, Southern later studied in Paris and Munich before returning to Oxford shortly before World War II. His books include "The Making of the Middle Ages," which has been translated into several languages, "Western Views of Islam in the Middle Ages," and "Medieval Humanism and Other Studies," which received the 1970 Royal Society of Literature Award.

In 1965, Southern was made a Corresponding Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, and in 1972 he joined the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences as a foreign member.

Southern's citation reads, "From the silences of history, this meticulous and discerning scholar has evoked a fresh perception of the Middle Ages."

Eudora Welty's work, following in the tradition of Flannery O'Connor and William Faulkner, is based on her perception of a distinctive Southern character, enduring despite massive changes in the social structure of the South.

Born in 1909 in Jackson, Miss., Welty has used her vision of the South to provide a metaphor for the mystery of human lives far beyond that landscape, providing insights, often complex and elusive, into the intricate relations between all men and women.

Perhaps one of America's most distinguished novelists--her novelThe Optimist's Daughter received the 1973 Pulitzer Prize for fiction--Welty still lives in Jackson, close to the characters she has immortalized in her fiction.

Welty's citation says: "Her compassionately observant eye, concern for style and place sensitively reveal the humor, pathos and mystery on the worn path of our shared experience."

Perhaps better known to the generation that matured during the '50s than to the one coming of age now, Marian Anderson was at one time one of the world's best-loved contraltos.

In 1935, Toscanini heard her sing and told her, "A voice like yours is heard only once in a hundred years."

One of the first black artists to achieve such international recognition, Anderson, whose repertory ranges from Bach to spirituals, took a strong stand against the segregationist laws that were still in effect until the mid-1960s.

She refused to sing concerts where blacks were not allowed to sit in every part of the auditorium--front as well as back--although she would sing even if they were still kept separate from the rest of the audience.

The most famous incident dramatizing her political as well as artistic position came in 1939, when her manager was refused booking at the Constitutional Hall in Washington, D.C., because of Anderson's race.