Muriel Rukeyser

Muriel Rukeyser (born December 15, 1913 in New York , † February 12, 1980 there ) was an American writer, translator and political activist. Her life and work were shaped by the themes of equality , feminism , social justice and Judaism .

life and work

Rukeyser came from a wealthy Jewish-American family. She first attended the private school Ethical Culture Fieldston in the Bronx , then Vassar College in Poughkeepsie and 2 years from 1930-32 Columbia University , which she left without a degree.

Her literary career began in 1935 with the publication of the poetry book Theory of Flight in the Yale Younger Poets Series . The choice of the volume for this series, which was inspired by a flight lesson completed by Rukeyser, was made by the writer Stephen Vincent Benét . In addition to her work as a writer, she advocated progressive politics at an early age , which she represented in poems, articles and reports and as a political activist. She has published in publications such as Daily Worker , Decision and Life & Letters Today ( London ).

At the age of 18, she reported on the trial of the Scottsboro Boys , in which nine young blacks between the ages of 13 and 21 were imprisoned in March 1931 and accused of raping two white women on a train. The scene of the trial was Scottsboro, Alabama , in the apparently tendentious and racist trial, eight of the mostly young people were sentenced to death and one to life imprisonment, the trial later went down as one of the most notorious civil rights trials in the history of the United States.

For Life & Letters Today Rukeyser traveled to Barcelona in 1936 to report from there on the People's Olympics , which the Catalan government wanted to organize in protest against the "Nazi" Olympiad in Berlin . However, the Olympics had to be canceled due to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War . However, this fact led to enough material that Rukeyser was able to process in various publications.

Your best-known report was the investigatively researched reporting on the occupational medical disaster during the construction of the Hawk's Nest Tunnel . Rukeyser wrote about the immediate, and especially later, consequences for predominantly black workers on a tunneling project near Charleston in West Virginia . Due to a lack of occupational safety measures, the workers were exposed to high levels of dust unprotected, although the management of the executing company Union Carbide was aware of the existing risk (managers wore dust masks during the inspection, for example). Several thousand of the tunnel workers died within a few years of silicosis , a form of dust lung . The author documented and processed many details of the notes made in her volume of poetry "Book of the Dead" (1937).

During and after the Second World War , she initially gave a number of widely acclaimed public lectures, held workshops for managers, gave seminars for university classes and published another volume of poetry, "The Life of Poetry" . In 1947 she also had an illegitimate son. During this time, they often had to assert themselves against conservative moralists, who saw a questionable role model for their children in an unmarried mother with radical political commitment, and even without her own academic career.

In the 60s and 70s she became more active politically and literarily again, she continued her work as president of the American PEN center. Together with the poet Denise Levertov , she undertook an unofficial peace mission to Hanoi to demonstrate against the Vietnam War . As early as 1968 she had signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" appeal, in which the signatories vowed to refuse to pay taxes in protest against the war. The eponymous poem of her last volume of poetry, "The Gates", is about the unsuccessful attempt to stand up for the condemned South Korean poet Kim Chi-Ha and to visit him on his death row. In 1967 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Cover of the biography "The Traces of Thomas Hariot" by Muriel Rukeyser

She has authored novels, essays, children's books and feminist plays. In addition to her poetic work, she wrote biographies about Josiah Willard Gibbs , Wendell Willkie and Thomas Harriot and translated works by Octavio Paz and Gunnar Ekelöf .

Muriel Rukeyser died on February 12, 1980 in New York from a stroke aggravated by her diabetes . She was 66 years old.

reception

Rukeyser was quoted and processed in various media. Jeanette Winterson, for example, quotes the poem “ King's Mountain ” in her novel “ Gut Symmetries (Eng. The Sister Universe) ” (1997). Eric Whitacre used a translation by Rukeyser of an Octavio Paz poem for his composition "Water Night". Various texts in the opera Doctor Atomic by John Adams come from her as well as in Libby Larsen 's work " Love After 1950 " from 2000. In 2015 Richard David Precht prefixed his three-volume history of philosophy with a quote from Muriel Rukeyser: The Universe is made of stories, not of atoms .

Works (selection)

• Theory of flight. , New Haven, 1935.
• Willard Gibbs: American Genius. , Woodbridge CT., 1942
• The life of poetry. , New York, 1949
• One Life. , New York, 1957, biography of Wendell Willkie.
• The outer banks. (Sea poetry). , Santa Barbara, 1967.
• The speed of darkness. , New York, 1968.
• The traces of Thomas Hariot. , New York, 1971
• Breaking Open. , New York, 1973.
• The gates: poems. , New York, 1976.
• The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser. , Pittsburgh, 2005.

literature

• Herzog, Anne E. & Kaufman, Janet E .: How Shall We Tell Each Other of the Poet ?: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser , Verlag Palgrave Macmillan 2001

Web links

• Biography at fembio.org (women biographical research)
• Muriel Rukeyser by Michael Thurston in Modern American Poetry , 2012
• Muriel Rukeyser's FBI entries

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Members: Muriel Rukeyser. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 23, 2019 .