Muriel Rukeyser (December 15, 1913 – February 12, 1980) was an American poet, essayist, biographer, novelist, screenwriter, and political activist. She wrote across genres and forms, addressing issues related to racial, gender, and class justice, war and war crimes, Jewish culture and diaspora, and American history, politics, and culture. Kenneth Rexroth said that she was the greatest poet of her "exact generation." Anne Sexton famously described her as "beautiful Muriel, mother of everyone"; Adrienne Rich wrote that she was “our twentieth-century Coleridge; our Neruda."
One of Rukeyser's most powerful pieces was the long poem The Book of the Dead (1938), which documented the details of the Hawks Nest Tunnel disaster, an industrial disaster in which hundreds of miners died of silicosis.
Muriel Rukeyser was born December 15, 1913, to Lawrence and Myra Lyons Rukeyser. Her family was Jewish, and the family's heroes were "the Yankee baseball team, the Republican party, and the men who built New York City." Her father was the co-founder and president of the Colonial Sand and Stone Company and Muriel enjoyed a relatively privileged upbringing. She attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, a private school in The Bronx, and in 1930, at age 16, she enrolled at Vassar College. She began her career as a journalist there, serving as a contributing editor to Vassar Miscellany News. Her father's business went bankrupt in 1932, however, and she was forced to drop out before completing her degree.
Rukeyser's literary career began in 1935 when her book of poetry Theory of Flight was chosen by the American poet Stephen Vincent Benét for publication in the Yale Younger Poets Series. In an autobiographical statement written during World War II, she claims "poetry and fire" as her primary influences.
Rukeyser never spoke publicly about her sexuality, but had relationships with men and women throughout her life. Her literary agent, Monica McCall, was her partner for decades. She was briefly married in 1945 to Glyn Collins, a painter from New Zealand. In 1947, she gave birth to her only child, William Rukeyser, whose father was not the man she had married.
In 1936, Rukeyser traveled to Spain to cover the People's Olympiad for the literary journal Life and Letters when the Spanish Civil War broke out. During her five-day stay, Rukeyser fell in love with Otto Boch, a German communist athlete who volunteered to fight the fascists and was later killed. One experience was evoked in her long poem sequence, "Letter to the Front" (1944), which includes "To be a Jew in the Twentieth Century."
Rukeyser died of a stroke on February 12, 1980, at age 66, in New York, with diabetes as a contributing factor.
Activism, teaching, and writing
Rukeyser was one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair.
Rukeyser was active in progressive politics throughout her life.
In 1933, she traveled to Scottsboro, Alabama to learn more about a case involving two white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, who accused nine black boys of rape in 1931. The case had become known nationally as the Scottsboro case and the boys as the Scottsboro boys. Eight of the boys were convicted, even though the case lacked substantive, physical evidence.
Ultimately, the case was appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ordered new trials. Rukeyser's task was to cover the boys' appeal trial. She was working for the International Labor Defense, which handled the defendants' appeals, and writing for the Student Review, a journal of the National Student League.
On her journey south, Rukeyser remembers seeing slogans posted: “There is terror in Alabama,” “Free the Scottsboro boys.” She also believed that this case extended beyond the immediate issue; it was linked to the problems of women in the workplace.
During her visit in Scottsboro, local police detained her after seeing her talk with Black reporters. Rukeyser documented that detention and concluded that “women must help in the fight to free the Scottsboro Boys as well as help to solve the problems that led to their trial.”
Several years later, in 1936, Rukeyser traveled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, with filmmaker and photographer Nancy Naumburg. They had met during the trip to Scottsboro as students. For this trip, they wanted to investigate what was a major industrial accident: the deaths and recurring silicosis among miners from their work in the Hawks Nest Tunnel. Initially, they planned a joint work, but it did not materialize.
However, Rukeyser did publish the documentary poem The Book of the Dead in her volume U.S. 1 (1938). This work covered the tragedy, its after-effects, and the court proceedings. Rukeyser said, in an interview, that her intent was to “write a series of poems linked together like the sequences in a movie are linked together.”
Rukeyser also wrote for the Daily Worker and a variety of publications including Decision and Life & Letters Today, for which she was assigned to cover the People's Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular, Barcelona), the Catalan government's alternative to the Nazis' 1936 Berlin Olympics. Instead of reporting on the Olympiad, she witnessed the first days of the Spanish Civil War, an experience that she would describe as a "moment of proof." This formed the basis of her rediscovered autobiographical novel Savage Coast and the long poem Mediterranean.
With World War II on the horizon, she published A Turning Wind (1939). In it, she seems to draw upon her experiences during the Spanish Civil War and look ahead to the turmoil in Europe, as in poems such as "Correspondences." She also adds a section entitled Lives, in which she has poems about some of the individuals she later writes biographies about, such as Willard Gibbs.