Former Harvard President Derek C. Bok, violinist Isaac stern and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John H. Updike '54 will receive honorary degrees at Commencement today.

Other honorary degrees will go to:

.Commencement speaker Gro Harlem Bruntland, the prime minister of Norway

.Ford Professor of the Social Science emeritus Daniel Bell

.Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert M. Solow '47

.Art collector Dominique de Menil

.California Institute of Technology physics professor Edward Carroll Stone

.Biochemistry professor and RNA researcher Joan Argetsinger Steitz

.Chair of the teachers Insurance and Annuity Association Clifton R. Wharton Jr. '47

.Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Robert M. Adams.

The University has assembled a diverse assortment of luminaries for this honor. Their areas of accomplishment range from art to music to writing, from the natural sciences to the social sciences.

Harvard tradition dictates that a former president receives an honorary degree the year after he ends his term. Bok, now 300th Anniversary University Professor, spent 20 years in Massachusetts Hall. Last year, he headed off to become a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto.

John H. Updike '54

Updike, the author of 14 novels and many short stories, won the Pulitzer Prize for Rabbit is Rich in 1981 and Rabbit at Rest in 1990. His book The Witches of Eastwick was made into a motion picture.

"He is the leading American novelist, now, ofhis generation, said Professor of English andAmerican Literature Philip J. Fisher. "He's anatural choice for this, a wonderful choice."

A member of the Lampoon, Updike graduatedsumma cum laude from Harvard in 1954. Hewrote for the New Yorker from 1955 to 1957and published his first novel in 1959.