The Lincoln Hall Project « College of Liberal Arts & Sciences « University of Illinois

Acclaimed novelist Rolando Hinojosa-Smith (PhD ’69, Spanish), discusses a late start, living with dignity, and “the luckiest thing I’ve ever done in my life.”

I’m a Texan, really. But for my master’s, I went to a little university called New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas. It’s a lovely climate—very cold in the winter—but it’s gorgeous. And the chairman of the department was a graduate of the U of I. And he took me under his wing. I think I scored the highest point of any of the graduates that year, and I was so recognized.

He said: “Write to Michigan, write to Chapel Hill,” and he mentioned other high-power universities. He said: “But also write to the University of Illinois, and I’ll write the chairman on your behalf as well.” And I was offered several, but I came to U of I, because of his influence. And it’s the luckiest thing I’ve ever done in my life—to have been accepted here and to be able to work here, to get to know Illinois and to love it. I’m an alum of the U of I.

I tell everybody in the world when they ask me where I went to school. I say so proudly. I finished here at the age of 40, when I defended my thesis. And for that I’m also grateful, because when I came in I was already in my 30s. And a lot of people are already full professors by the time they’re 30 or 32, whatever it is. So I got a very late start. But it didn’t matter. I spent those nine very productive years writing and teaching and meeting all manner of people in many classes of American society. And three years in the army, that also helped to form part of my life and my writing.

And I’ve been publishing since I was 40.... My wife and I had been married three days when we came here. We married up in Bay City, Mich. And we drove down, and she went over to the engineering department. She was an English major at Ann Arbor. And I went straight to Lincoln Hall, where Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese were housed. And I reported, and they gave me my key. No, I went to another place where they gave me my key in there.

By this time, we started moving in at Orchard Downs, which was brand new. We were the very first occupants in the class of ’63 who came here in 1963. After graduation, I wrote to President David Dodds Henry, thanking him for allowing us to live with dignity, because it was a lovely place, great apartment, quiet, and we had the yellow bus to ride to campus. And Patty, my wife, worked as an associate editor for an engineering journal near the time of Dr. John Bardeen, our twice nobelist here.