Call Number:

AC326

Repository:

Princeton University Library: University Archives

Extent:

1 linear feet (1 correspondence box)

Language:

English

Date:

1957-1966 (inclusive)

Creator:

Burt, Robert A., 1939-2015 (Class of 1960) and Ruas, Charles

Form:

Correspondence -- 20th century

Abstract:

Robert Amsterdam Burt, Charles Edward Ruas, James LeBaron Stinnett, and Nicholas Churchill Yost, Class of 1960, were undergraduate roommates at Princeton. The collection consists of letters written between them, primarily letters to Charles Ruas, as well as other members of the Classes of 1960 and 1961.

Robert "Bo" Amsterdam Burt was born in 1939 in Philadelphia. Burt was a member of the Princeton University Class of 1960, obtained a BA in Jurisprudence from Oxford University in 1962, and was a member of the Yale Law School Class of 1964. While at Princeton, Burt majored in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs; he was active in the Whig-Cliosophic Society, was on the editorial board of the Nassau Lit, and was a member of the Arts at Princeton Committee. He was married to Linda Rose in 1964 in New York City and had two daughters. Burt later joined the Yale Law School faculty, and taught there for 38 years. He became Professor Emeritus in 2015, shortly before his death.

Charles Ruas is an American author, interviewer, editor, literary and art critic, and French translator. Born in Tientsin, China, in 1938, Ruas studied French, English, and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where he received a BA in 1960, MA in 1963, and PhD in 1970. Ruas was a Fulbright scholar at the Sorbonne in 1963 and 1964. From 1974 to 1979, Ruas served as the Director of the Drama and Literature Department for New York's Pacifica station WBAI-FM, where he interviewed many famous cultural and literary icons and initiated several innovative literary programs, including the Audio-Experimental Theatre, which fostered collaboration among artists on multimedia projects for radio, and The Reading Experiment, a year-long series of readings from Marguerite Young's novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Ruas also developed radio programming for the Museum of Modern Art's WPS1 Art Radio, served as an editor for Marguerite Young and other writers, published literary and art criticism for The Soho Weekly News, ARTnews, and Art in America, and conducted interviews of writers for The New York Times Book Review and The Paris Review. In 1985, Ruas published Conversations with American Writers, which includes a group of interviews from the early 1980s with several major writers, including Toni Morrison, Eudora Welty, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, and others. He lives and works in New York City.

Robert Amsterdam Burt, Charles Edward Ruas, James LeBaron Stinnett, and Nicholas Churchill Yost, Class of 1960, were undergraduate roommates at Princeton. Their letters to each other, as well as some letters from other classmates from the classes of 1960 and 1961, were written in the summers while they were undergraduates, as well as during the several years afterwards, as they pursued graduate studies, various jobs, and sometimes traveled or lived abroad.

The first series consists primarily of letters from Robert Burt to Charles Edward Ruas '60, as well as some letters to James Le Baron Stinnett '60 and Nicholas Churchill Yost '60. Much of the correspondence was sent after the classmates left Princeton, during the period 1960-1964.

The second series of correspondence consists of a donation from Charles Ruas of letters he received between 1957 and 1966 from John Coe '60, Nicholas Yost, James Stinnett, Edward Pell '60, William Wu '61, and a postcard from Paul Oppenheimer '61.