RUTH GRUBER photojournalist icon visit & talk

Born in Brooklyn in 1911, Ruth Gruber became the youngest Ph.D. in the world before going on to become an international foreign correspondent at age 24. With her love of adventure, her fearlessness and powerful intellect, Gruber defied tradition in an extraordinary career that spanned seven decades. Her many accomplishments included escorting Holocaust refugees to America in 1944, covering the Nuremberg trials in 1946, and documenting the Haganah ship “Exodus” in 1947. Gruber’s relationships with world leaders, including Eleanor Roosevelt, President Harry Truman and Prime Minister David Ben Gurion of Israel, gave her a unique access and insight into the modern history of the Jewish people.

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 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.


Some of Gruber's important photographs...

An amazing woman. 
An inspiring human being. 


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