Honorary doctorate from Princeton

He went to the ceremony reluctantly, accompanied by his wife Sara and David Crosby, and found the formality uncomfortable. It was a hot day, and the air was full of the noise of cicadas emerging that summer. He wrote about the experience as "Day of the Locusts", released on New Morning later in 1970, and recalled it again in his memoir Chronicles, Volume One. The degree was an early sign that the academic world took him seriously as a writer, at a time when his new records were getting mixed reviews. Far larger honors came later: a special Pulitzer citation in 2008, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2016.