Who Is MacKenzie Scott?

However as Ms. Scott’s fame for giving freely cash has grown, so, too, has the deluge of appeals for items from strangers and outdated pals alike. That clamor might have pushed Ms. Scott’s already discreet operation additional underground, with current philanthropic bulletins akin to sudden lightning bolts for unsuspecting recipients.

Makes an attempt to succeed in Ms. Scott and her husband, Dan Jewett, a chemistry instructor, for this text by cellphone, e mail and letter, instantly and thru intermediaries, had been met with silence.

As an alternative, The New York Occasions relied on interviews with greater than two dozen pals, lecturers, former colleagues and acquaintances from each chapter of her life, in addition to public data and the uncommon interviews Ms. Scott has given, usually at the side of the publication of certainly one of her novels. This text can also be based mostly on beforehand unpublished letters between Ms. Scott and Ms. Morrison, saved within the Nobel laureate’s archive on the Princeton College library.

“I suppose the one manner I’ll discover out what’s going to not work for me in life is by making an attempt it,” she wrote to Ms. Morrison in September 1992, a number of months after commencement and at a pivotal second for her future. Waitressing in New York had proved extra grueling than ready tables in Princeton throughout school, leaving her too drained to put in writing.

“I discovered myself with unpredictable and small chunks of time throughout which I both collapsed from exhaustion and frustration, or ruminated over the excruciating monotony of creating and promoting sandwiches,” she wrote, “and apprehensive about how I would pay my hire with the nickels they gave me in trade for my ennui.”

The week earlier than, she had began work at an funding agency, together with her future husband, Mr. Bezos.

Three a long time after worrying about making hire, and even within the wake of her current items, Ms. Scott, 52, hovers round $50 billion, in response to Forbes magazine. She has set about dispersing her huge fortune with unprecedented pace and directness to frontline charities and nonprofits with a acknowledged emphasis on advancing social justice and combating inequality, all whereas making an attempt to maintain herself out of the highlight.

“Placing massive donors on the heart of tales on social progress is a distortion of their function,” she wrote in an essay final 12 months, one in a sequence of deliberate public communiqués on her giving.