Mother Of Us All: The Life and Writing of Muriel Rukeyser

FAIN: FZ-287308-22

Rowena Kennedy-Epstein
University of Bristol (Bristol BS81TB England)

Research and writing of a biography of the American writer Muriel Rukeyser
(1913-1980).

This is the first biography of the American writer Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980), whose genre-bending work (poetry, plays, films, novels and biographies), involvement in wide-ranging artistic and political circles from New York to Hollywood, and accounts of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of fascism, racial injustice, environmental disaster, and single motherhood, defied and remade women's positions in 20th-C America. Described by Anne Sexton and Adrienne Rich as “mother of us all,” Rukeyser changed how we see the role of the woman writer, the activist writer, the queer writer, the Jewish writer, and the mother writer, and yet she has not been recognized for these revolutionary reinventions, but silenced by Cold War gender, political and publishing norms. This biography makes visible Rukeyser’s central place in American literature, as a catalyst and creator, demonstrating the value of her work for understanding the political crises—and possibilities—of our own times.

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