Schwartz, who now teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston, remembered working on a short silent film with his roommate in which Atwood starred.

In the film, a professor wages a revolution with his students, who summon each other to battle with a ram’s horn.

One sequence featured three couples in bed. Of the first two couples, the male members roused themselves from bed to join the battle. Of the third, however, the woman rose to take up arms, leaping from bed and driving off on a motorcycle.

That woman was Atwood.

“Even then, we knew that there was something kind of more adventurous and tougher and more potent about Peggy Atwood than a lot of other women who were graduate students,” Schwartz said. “Peggy was one of those people who really did stand up for her self-respect and power.”

In coming to Radcliffe, Atwood entered an English department that her fellow student Richard M. Dyer recalled as being “very competitive.”

According to Dyer, the department admitted 100 graduate students but only kept 30 of them. In a departmental meeting, students were told to look to their left and right because the people around them were not likely to be there next year, Dyer remembered.

Along with Dyer, Atwood worked as a grader for an English class on the bildungsroman taught by professor Jerome H. Buckley, a man who would later become an adviser and friend of Atwood. Atwood worked as a grader, rather than a teaching fellow, because her Canadian visa prohibited her from getting a work permit.

Though faced with obstacles, Atwood was able to demonstrate her talent for language and writing during her time at Radcliffe.

“We all knew she was talented and vibrant and interesting,” Dyer said. “But I don’t think anyone could’ve predicted what she evolved into.”

Atwood earned her master’s degree from Radcliffe in 1962 but decided to leave Harvard before finishing her doctoral dissertation.

Harvard, however, has remained a source of inspiration for her writing. Her time at Harvard is particularly evident in her feminist novel “The Handmaid’s Tale,” a book set in Harvard Square that aims to make a statement about contemporary gender relations.

For Atwood, writing is a way to combat the challenges—like those she faced at Radcliffe—of everyday life.

“Writing is an act of hope,” Atwood said upon receiving her Radcliffe Medal in 2003. “However gloomy the content of the writing may be, the mere act of putting pen to paper is an act of communication; it presupposes a future reader, and thus a future.”

—Staff writer Gina K. Hackett can be reached at ghackett@college.harvard.edu.