While she wonders aloud whether Harvard students realize how privileged they are, she says she's very impressed with the students as a whole, especially their love of learning and intellectual curiosity.

"There is such a wide variety of things that people do. It's really great," she says. "There's so much of a crosscurrent between arts and sciences."

"You've got students from all over the world, who got here not because papa's rich, but because these are students who have real merit."

She thinks for a moment, and then smiles before adding, "I do think students have a pretty good time."

South Africa Today

The South Africa Gordimer will return to is a far different country than the one she came back to in 1969.

Apartheid no longer exists, a new constitution is in effect, and Nelson Mandela, the leader of the African National Congress, Gordimer's political party, is president.

While problems like illiteracy and poverty are no less serious now, there is a can-do feeling pervading the country, she says.

"The majority, and those of us who support the majority, said, 'Give us responsibility,'" Gordimer says. "And now we've got it and now we have to deal with it."

"[There is] a very sober and determined attempt to look at all the problems," she adds. "The attitude is right."

Gordimer has lived in South Africa all her life. She was born in the small mining town of Springs in 1923. Her father was a Latvian immigrant and a jeweler, her mother a British transplant.

She dropped out of college to marry her first husband, Dr. Gerald Gavron. In 1952, the couple split. Gordimer married her current husband, Reinhold Cassirer, in 1954.

Gordimer has two children, Oriane, 44, and Hugo, 39.

Today at 4:30 p.m. in Sanders Theatre, Nadine Gordimer will deliver a lecture titled, "That Other World That Was the World." The talk, which concludes her Norton lecture series "Writing and Being," will focus on her ties to South Africa