But as Mrs. As Scott’s fame for giving away money grew, so did the deluge of requests for gifts from strangers and old friends alike. Those screams may have driven Ms. Scott’s already discreet operation further underground, with recent philanthropic announcements resembling sudden bolts of lightning to unsuspecting recipients.
Attempts to reach Ms. Scott and her husband, Dan Jewett, a chemistry teacher, for this article by phone, email, and letter, directly and through intermediaries, have been met with silence.
Instead, The New York Times relied on interviews with more than two dozen friends, teachers, former colleagues and acquaintances from every chapter of her life, as well as public records and the rare interviews Ms. Scott has given, usually in conjunction with the publication of one of her novels. This article is also based on previously unpublished letters between Ms. Scott and Ms. Morrison, kept in the Nobel laureate’s archive at the Princeton University Library.
“I think the only way to find out what will happen… not work for me in life is by trying,” she wrote to Ms. Morrison in September 1992, a few months after graduation and at a pivotal time for her future. Waitress in New York had proved heavier than tables in Princeton during her studies, leaving her too tired to write.
“I found myself having unpredictable and small chunks of time where I either collapsed from exhaustion and frustration, or brooded over the excruciating monotony of making and selling sandwiches,” she wrote, “and worried about how I would pay my rent with the nickels. they gave me in exchange for my boredom.”
The week before, she had started an investment company with her future husband, Mr. Bezos.
Three decades after she worried about making rent, and even in the wake of her recent gifts, Ms. Scott, 52, is hovering around $50 billion, according to Forbes magazine. She has begun to spread her vast fortune with unprecedented speed and immediacy to frontline charities and nonprofits with a pronounced emphasis on promoting social justice and fighting inequality, while trying to keep herself out of the limelight.
“Putting major donors at the center of stories of social progress is a distortion of their role,” she wrote in an essay last year, one in a series of deliberate public communiqués about her giving.
