Volume 10 17
Author Biography.
Rukeyser was born in New York in 1913 to
Lawrence and Myra Rukeyser, a conservative and
well-off Jewish couple. Her parents provided her
with many privileges of wealth, including a chauf-
feur and a private education. However, her par-
ents’ unhappy marriage also contributed toward
Rukeyser’s incipient pacifism. “The memories of
emotional violence which she retained from her
childhood must have colored her lifelong commit-
ment to nonviolence, as surely as the graphic im-
ages from the battlefields of the Great War (World
War II),” wrote Kate Daniels in her introduction
to Out of Silence.
By her late teens Rukeyser had completely re-
jected her parents’ lifestyle, throwing herself into
her writing and political commitments. She at-
tended Vassar College for two years, then withdrew
in 1932 in order to write full time. In 1933 she at-
tended the trial of the Scottsboro Boys, an infamous
case in which black men were falsely accused of
raping a white woman. She was profoundly af-
fected by the injustice she witnessed. She contin-
ued to travel as an advocate against injustice of all
kinds, which took her from West Virginia, where
she protested unsafe working conditions for min-
ers, to Spain, where she protested the holding of
the Olympic Games in Nazi Germany. She pub-
lished her first, highly acclaimed volume of poetry,
Theory of Flight,in 1935, which reflected many
of these experiences. During the 1930s, when
Rukeyser was in her twenties, she, like many other
New York writers and intellectuals, joined the
Communist party. By the end of the decade she had
cut ties with the party, adopting politics of non-
partisan pacifism that is evident throughout her
body of work.
Rukeyser wrote prolifically and successfully
until single motherhood slowed her productivity.
She had a very brief marriage and then, in 1947,
became pregnant out of wedlock by a man whose
identity she never disclosed. In order to support her
son, she took a job teaching at Sarah Lawrence Col-
lege. Her position there was threatened when, in
the conservative tenor of the 1950s, her ties to the
Communist party were investigated, but the college
supported her and she was able to retain her post.
In the 1960s, when her son was grown and the
mood of the country had become more sympathetic
to her political activism, her career had a renais-
sance. Rukeyser published more frequently and re-
mained politically active. She was once jailed for
her participation in a Vietnam War demonstration.
In her sixties and in poor health, Rukeyser traveled
to South Korea to protest the death sentence of a
dissident poet. She based her last major poem, “The
Gates,” published in 1976, on this experience.
Rukeyser died in 1980.Ballad of Orange and GrapeMuriel Rukeyser