the last book I ever read (Margaret Atwood's Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts, excerpt four)

from Book of Lives: A Memoir of Sorts by Margaret Atwood:

Founders’ House, since torn down and replaced by the Gutman Library, was to become one of the models for the Commander’s house in The Handmaid’s Tale. In fact, every building in the novel exists in Cambridge, or existed then. Handmaid outfits were to be obtained at the Brattle Theatre, renamed as Lilies of the Field. Soul Scrolls for automated prayers were located in the Harvard Coop. The secret service—the Eyes—had their headquarters in Widener Library, which was appropriate: both organizations gathered and stored information. The Harvard Wall was where the bodies of the executed were displayed. The cemetery mentioned in the book, with the slogan In Spe (In Hope) quoted from a tombstone, is the Old Burying Ground just outside Harvard Square, where I spent many morbid but instructive hours making gravestone rubbings with charcoal: skulls and hourglasses and cherub heads with wings, giving way to willow trees and urns as the seventeenth century segued into the eighteenth.

Harvard was not amused when The Handmaid’s Tale first appeared: they wrote a sniffy review of it. Were they not now a broadly liberal institution? Did they really have to be reminded that they had started life as a Puritan theological seminary? But they came round later.