Up
for auction "The Tiger's Eye" Ruth Stephan Hand Signed Newspaper Article Dated 1971.
ES-345
he writer Ruth Stephan (born Charlotte Ruth Walgreen) published
her first poems in the late 1930s in venues such as Harper's, Poetry, and
Forum, and her first volume, Prelude to Poetry, was published in 1946. With her
husband, the painter John Stephan, she founded and edited the influential
quarterly magazine The Tiger's Eye (1947-1951), which showcased the work of
artists and writers with particular emphasis on abstract expressionism. In
addition to further volumes of poetry, her work includes two novels based on
the life of Queen Christina of Sweden, The Flight (1956) and My Crown, My Love
(1960); a volume of translated Quechua stories and songs, The Singing
Mountaineers (1957); an audio compilation, The Spoken Anthology of American
Literature (1963); and a documentary film, Zen in Ryoko-in (1971). Her
philanthropic work included establishing a poetry center at the University of
Arizona in 1960. Stephan was born in Chicago on January 21, 1910, the daughter
of drugstore founder Charles R. Walgreen and Myrtle Norton Walgreen. She
attended Northwestern University but left without a degree in 1929 when she
married Justin W. Dart, with whom she had two sons. Unsupported by her family
when she began to take herself seriously as a writer, she divorced Dart in 1939.
Later that same year she married the painter John Stephan; their only child, a
son, was born in 1941. In 1942 the Stephans moved to Westport, Connecticut,
where they founded The Tiger's Eye in 1947. This venture lasted until 1951,
when the work of producing the magazine threatened to overtake the couple's own
creative work. In 1961, Ruth Stephan divorced John Stephan and spent time
traveling in Japan and Southeast Asia, where she became interested in Zen
Buddhism. In 1966 she married John C. Franklin, a scientist, and lived the
remainder of her life in Greenwich, Connecticut. She died in North Salem, New
York, on April 9, 1974.