Ruth Gruber is an award-winning Jewish American journalist, photographer, and humanitarian; born in Brooklyn in 1911, she became the youngest PhD in the world and went on to author nineteen books.
Gruber’s groundbreaking study of the work and legacy of Virginia Woolf—an enduring feminist analysis pairing two of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary writers
In 1932, Ruth Gruber earned her PhD—the youngest person ever to do so—with a stunning doctoral dissertation on Virginia Woolf. Published in 1935, the paper was the first-ever feminist critique of Woolf’s work and inspired a series of correspondences between the two writers. It also led to Gruber’s eventual meeting with Woolf, which she recounted six decades later in Virginia Woolf: The Will to Create as a Woman.
Described by Gruber as “the odyssey of how I met Virginia Woolf, and how her life and work became intertwined with my life,” Virginia Woolf is a clear and insightful portrait of one of modern literature’s most innovative authors, written by one of America’s most remarkable journalists.
“Ruth Gruber is an adventure in herself.”
“You couldn’t invent Ruth Gruber . . . not even in a movie.”
Ruth Gruber is an award-winning Jewish American journalist, photographer, and humanitarian. Born in Brooklyn in 1911, she became the youngest PhD in the world and went on to author nineteen books, including the National Jewish Book Award–winning biography Raquela (1978). She also wrote several memoirs documenting her astonishing experiences, among them Ahead of Time (1991), Inside of Time (2002), and Haven (1983), which documents her role in the rescue of one thousand refugees from Europe and their safe transport to America. Gruber lives in New York City.
2010 - National Jewish Book Award
2009 - Overseas Press Club (OPC)
2008 - Overseas Press Club (OPC)
1979 - National Jewish Book Award for Raquela: A Woman of Israel
Golda Meir Human Rights Award
Simon Wiesenthal Center's Museum of Tolerance Award