Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) Myth LINKS Paris Press -- About Muriel Rukeyser http://www.westmass.com/Paris-Press/muriel.htm Maintained by the Paris Press, this site provides some useful bigoraphical information about the poet and her career. The Paris Press icon at the bottom of the page is a link to more information about Rukeyser and two of her books which are published by the press. The Academy of American Poets - Poetry Exhibits: Muriel Rukeyser http://www.poets.org/lit/poet/mrukeyse.htm This site contains a brief biography of Rukeyser, a selected bibliography, the text of one of her poems, and a list of links. BIOGRAPHY Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) Born in New York City, Rukeyser attended Vassar and Columbia, then spent a short time at Roosevelt Aviation School, which no doubt helped shape her first published volume of poetry, Theory of Flight (1935). In the early 1930s, she joined Elizabeth Bishop, Mary McCarthy, and Eleanor Clark in founding a literary magazine that challenged the policies of the Vassar Review. (The two magazines later merged.) A social activist, Rukeyser witnessed the Scottsboro trials (where she was one of the reporters arrested by authorities) in 1933. She visited suffering tunnel workers in West Virginia (1936) and went to Hanoi to protest U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. She gave poetry readings across the United States and received several awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Copernicus Award. Waterlily Fire: Poems 1935–1962 appeared in 1962, and later work was collected in 29 Poems (1970). The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser appeared in 1978. Her only novel, The Orgy, appeared in 1965.