Charles Ruas Papers

Ruas, Charles

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.

Morrison, Toni

Toni Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio in 1931. She attended Howard University, graduating in 1953 with a degree in English, then received an MA in literature from Cornell University in 1955.

After a brief teaching stint at Texas Southern University, Morrison returned to teach at Howard in 1957. There, she married architect Harold Morrison, with whom she had two sons, Harold Ford Morrison (born 1961) and Slade Kevin Morrison (1964-2010). The two divorced around the time of Slade's birth, after which Morrison began working as a textbook editor for a division of Random House based in Syracuse, NY. In 1967, Morrison was promoted to senior editor and moved to New York City, where she worked with a number of emerging influential African-American writers, including Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, Henry Dumas, and Gayl Jones, in addition to editing The Black Book (1974), a compilation of African-American historical documents.

Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. She has published a total of eleven novels to date, winning numerous literary and cultural awards including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved in 1988, the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, the National Humanities Medal in 2000, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. In addition to her novels, Morrison has written non-fiction, poetry, children's literature (in collaboration with her son Slade), and dramatic works.

In 1983, she left her position at Random House to concentrate on writing and teaching, serving as the Albert Schweitzer Professor of the Humanities at SUNY Albany from 1984-1989, then the Robert E. Goheen Professor in the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University until her retirement in 2006. During this time, she taught classes in creative writing, African-American studies, and, at Princeton, developed the interdisciplinary Atelier program. She has also served as a visiting professor and lecturer at numerous institutions, including Yale University, the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and Harvard University.

Morrison lived in Grand View-on-Hudson in New York until her death in 2019 at age 88.

Nin, Anaïs (1903-1977)

Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) was a French-born American diarist, essayist, novelist, and critic associated with modernist and surrealist circles. Her work foregrounded psychological interiority, experimental prose, and women's artistic self-representation, shaping later developments in autobiographical writing and feminist literature.

The papers consist of materials related to Charles Ruas's work as a literary editor and interviewer, including transcripts, audiocassette tapes, and CD-ROMs of Ruas's interviews with writers and artists, typescripts and galleys of work by writers Ruas edited, manuscript materials he collected, as well as photographs, correspondence, recordings, and publicity materials that he kept regarding many of the authors with whom he worked.

Interview transcripts and recordings contain Ruas's author interviews, which he conducted for WBAI-FM, WPS1 Art Radio, The Paris Review, and Conversations with American Writers, a book of interviews he published in 1985. Writers represented in the interviews include Toni Morrison, Carlos Fuentes, Michel Foucault, Eudora Welty, Susan Sontag, Truman Capote, Buckminster Fuller, Andy Warhol, Mario Vargas Llosa, Norman Mailer, E. L. Doctorow, Tennessee Williams, Marguerite Young, James Laughlin, and others. While interviews primarily cover specific works by authors and the writing process, some tapes also document readings of work by writers and other live performances. The papers also include typescript drafts and galleys of books by writers whose work Ruas edited, including his own editorial drafts, as well as copies and manuscript materials that were gifted to him by authors, including Susan Howe, his co-host for poetry programming at WBAI-FM, and Marguerite Young, whose epic biography Harp Song for a Radical: The Life and Times of Eugene Victor Debs Ruas edited. Drafts and galleys of work by Helen Adam, Susan Sontag, and Djuna Barnes are also present, along with a group of dust jacket proofs. Also included are some correspondence, interview questions, photographs, and promotional materials from various writers Ruas interviewed or whose work he edited or reviewed.

A significant group of photographs of authors and artists was added to the collection beginning in 2016, including promotional photographs and portraits collected by Ruas, as well as shots from the WBAI recording studio. Some contact sheets and negatives are also present.

There are also some translations and other writings by Charles Ruas, including his translation of Death and the Labyrinth by Michel Foucault

Later additions comprise a collection of family papers and photographs documenting the history of Tianjin, China, from the 1890s through the mid-20th century.

The collection is arranged into five primary file groups: Author and Artist Files; Interviews, Radio, and Television; Photographs; Translations and Writings; and Family Papers and Tianjin History Collection.

Gift of Charles Ruas in 2014-2023 (AM 2014-100, AM 2014-106, AM 2014-107, AM 2015-4, AM 2016-44, AM 2017-56, AM 2017-110, AM 2019-4, 2019-97, 2020-39, 2020-68, 2021-54, and AM 2024-016).

For preservation reasons, original analog and digital media may not be read or played back in the reading room. Users may visually inspect physical media but may not remove it from its enclosure. All analog audiovisual media must be digitized to preservation-quality standards prior to use. Audiovisual digitization requests are processed by an approved third-party vendor. Please note, the transfer time required can be as little as several weeks to as long as several months and there may be financial costs associated with the process. Requests should be directed through the Ask Us Form.

This collection contains digital files, which may require specific software or hardware for access. Refer to our Tips on Accessing Born-Digital Content for information on how to render these file formats.

This collection was processed by Kelly Bolding in January 2015. Finding aid written by Kelly Bolding in January 2015. Finding aid updated by Kelly Bolding with new materials in December 2015, November 2016, March 2017, July 2018, March 2020. Description for the Family Papers and Tianjin History Collection series was added by Kelly Bolding in June 2021, based on description provided by Charles Ruas and Joshua Seufert. The 2023 accrual was processed by Amy C. Vo in 2024, with the finding aid updated to reflect this addition.

The born-digital materials in this collection have been processed according to Princeton University Library's Born-Digital Processing Workflows. For more information on the workflow, please read our full Born-Digital Processing Information Note.

Selected first editions and inscribed books from Charles Ruas's library are held in the Rare Books Collection.

Audio files containing many of Charles Ruas's recorded interviews can be accessed on the website of Clocktower Productions in Conversations with Writers and Historic Audio from the Archives of Charles Ruas.

Nothing was removed from the collection during 2015-2024 processing beyond routine appraisal practices.

Use

Single copies may be made for research purposes. To cite or publish quotations that fall within Fair Use, as defined under U. S. Copyright Law, no permission is required. For instances beyond Fair Use, it is the responsibility of the researcher to determine whether any permissions related to copyright, privacy, publicity, or any other rights are necessary for their intended use of the Library's materials, and to obtain all required permissions from any existing rights holders, if they have not already done so. Princeton University Library's Special Collections does not charge any permission or use fees for the publication of images of materials from our collections, nor does it require researchers to obtain its permission for said use. The department does request that its collections be properly cited and images credited. More detailed information can be found on the Copyright, Credit and Citations Guidelines page on our website. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us through the Ask Us! form.

Publisher

Manuscripts Division

Date

2015

Creator

Ruas, Charles

Subject

Authors and publishers -- New York (N.Y.) -- 20th century -- Interviews

Authors, American -- 20th century -- Interviews

Editors -- New York (N.Y.) -- 20th century

Experimental radio programs -- 20th century -- Sources

Novelists, American -- 20th century -- Interviews

Radio personalities -- 20th century -- Correspondence

Shipbuilding -- China -- History -- 20th century -- Sources

People

Howe, Susan (1937)

Morrison, Toni

Nin, Anaïs (1903-1977)

Young, Marguerite (1908-1995)

Ruas family

Organization

WBAI Radio (New York, N.Y.)

Place

China -- History -- Qing dynasty, 1644-1912 -- Sources

New York (N.Y.) -- Intellectual life -- 20th century

Tianjin (China) -- History -- 20th century -- Sources

Language

English

Form

Audiocassettes -- 20th century

Interviews -- 20th century

photographs -- 20th century

proofs (printed matter) -- 20th century

Transcripts -- 20th century