Ruth Stone
Ruth Stone was an influential American poet, born on June 8, 1915, in Roanoke, Virginia. She experienced a rich literary upbringing, nurtured by her family's love for reading and literature. Stone's life was marked by significant personal challenges, including the tragic suicide of her second husband, which left her to raise their three daughters alone in poverty. Despite these hardships, she persisted in her writing and teaching career. Stone published her first collection, *In an Iridescent Time*, in 1959, but faced a long gap before her next volume appeared in 1971, reflecting her struggles during that period. Over her lifetime, she received numerous prestigious awards, including the National Book Award and Guggenheim Fellowships, recognizing her contributions to poetry and literature. Notably, she continued to write and publish even as she faced significant health challenges in her later years. Ruth Stone's poetry is celebrated for its depth, wisdom, and emotional resonance, making her a vital voice in American literature.
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Ruth Stone
Poet
- Born: June 8, 1915
- Birthplace: Roanoke, Virginia
- Died: November 19, 2011
Biography
Known for the range and wisdom of her affirming yet realistic poetry, Ruth (Perkins) Stone was born on June 8, 1915, in Roanoke, Virginia, in her grandparents’ house. After first grade, Stone moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, to be near the parents of her father, Roger McDowell Perkins, a musician. Both Stone’s father and mother, Ruth Ferguson Perkins, read to her often from a wide variety of works, and Stone was fascinated by the large libraries in her grandparents’ houses.
At the age of nineteen, she moved to Illinois with her first husband, a chemist; after their divorce, Stone married Walter B. Stone, a poet, novelist, and teacher, with whom she had three daughters, Marcia, Phoebe, and Abigail. She also began publishing poetry; in 1955 she won the Kenyon Review Fellowship in Poetry and received the Bess Hokin Award from Poetry magazine. Stone’s first collection of poems, In an Iridescent Time, was published in 1959.
However, Stone’s next volume would not be published for another twelve years. After the family had moved to England in 1959, Walter Stone committed suicide by hanging, leaving Ruth Stone in poverty to raise their three children. Although receiving a two-year fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute in 1963 helped Stone financially, she passed through a decade of intermittent depression; her second collection, Topography, and Other Poems (1971), reflects her grief and anger during this time. In 1971, she also won the first of her Guggenheim Fellowships. The next was in 1975.
After moving back to America, Stone began an extended series of teaching positions at various colleges such as Wellesley College, Brandeis University, the University of Illinois, Indiana University, New York University, and Center College in Kentucky, teaching at a new college or colleges almost every year for several years. In the early 2000’s, she was a professor of English at the State University of New York in Binghamton and held a B.A. from Harvard University.
Besides the awards mentioned, Stone won numerous others, including a Breadloaf Writers’ Conference Fellowship (1963), the Vermont Cerf Award for lifetime achievement in the arts, the Shelley Memorial Award (1964), a second Kenyon Review Fellowship (1965), an Academy of Arts and Letters Grant (1970), the PEN Award (1974), the Delmore Schwartz Award (1983), the Whiting Writer’s Award (1986), the Paterson Poetry Prize (1988), the National Book Critics Circle Award for Ordinary Words (1999), a National Book Award for In the Next Galaxy (2002), and the Wallace Stevens Award (also in 2002).
In 2004, nearly blind at the age of eighty-nine, Stone published In the Dark. Despite her physical infirmity, her poetic vision remained evocative and clear. She lived in Vermont, where she maintained a residence since 1957.