Arthur Brown Ruhl

Background

Arthur Brown Ruhl was born in Rockford, Ill. , the son of Antes Schoch and Nellie (Brown) Ruhl.

Education

He prepared for college at the Rockford high school and entered Harvard, where his undergraduate experiences helped in a marked degree to shape his future career. He distinguished himself as a distance runner. He graduated in 1899 with the degree of A. B.

Career

While studying, Ruhl served on the editorial staffs of the Lampoon and Advocate. After his graduation in 1899 he became a reporter for the New York Evening Sun, but in his spare time he continued to indulge his interest in athletics. In 1905 he published, in collaboration with Samuel Crowther, Rowing and Track Athletics, to which Ruhl himself contributed a history of the track. He had also begun to develop a talent for fiction, and in 1906 he brought out a number of his stories under the title Break in Training. His enthusiasm for athletics continued throughout his life.

A more significant phase of his career had begun in 1904, when he joined the staff of Collier's as a special reporter. In this capacity he was in South America in 1906, when the Pan-American Conference met in Rio de Janeiro. The literary product of his experiences on this trip was The Other Americans (1908), in which he discussed the Latin American countries and their problems, especially emphasizing the need of a more sympathetic attitude on the part of the United States toward the South American republics.

Subsequent visits to the same countries resulted in a work entitled The Central Americans (1928). While still with Collier's, he had frequently covered Broadway performances, and his success in this work led to his appointment in 1913 as the dramatic critic for the New York Tribune. Much of the dramatic criticism which he had contributed at this period to Collier's and to the Sunday issue of the Tribune he collected in Second Nights: People and Ideas of the Theatre To-Day (1914).

Never wholly content with the humdrum life of the Broadway reporter, he went to Mexico in 1914, where he was present at the shelling of Vera Cruz, before the United States forces landed at the port. A few months later, he again joined the staff of Collier's as a war correspondent, and he was immediately sent to Belgium and France. In the following year, 1915, he moved on to Central Europe. His original dispatches to Collier's were soon rewritten and published with the title Antwerp to Gallipoli: A Year of War on Many Fronts--and Behind Them (1916). Here he not only described graphically his experiences in France and Belgium, but gave accounts of visits to two German prison camps and to the German trenches. Another chapter was devoted to the Turks at the Dardanelles.

A brief but interesting article by Ruhl called "The War Correspondent, " describing the status of one gathering war news, appeared in The Story of the Great War, a collaborative work edited by E. J. Reynolds and issued by Collier's in 1916. The experiences of 1916 and 1917, years spent in Russia, he recorded in White Nights and Other Russian Impressions (1917).

In 1918 he returned to France, and the following year went to the Baltic states. While still in the eastern Baltic he shifted his journalistic connections to the New York Evening Post. Deeply fascinated by the social changes wrought in the four Baltic republics by their sudden liberation, he described in New Masters of the Baltic (1921) the events concerned with their independence, many of which he had personally witnessed.

In 1922 and 1923 he served with the American Relief Administration in Russia. His final work as a foreign correspondent (now for the New York Herald Tribune) took him in 1925 to Berlin, where he stayed for two years.

The last ten years of his life were spent in varied reportorial and literary pursuits. Always much interested in sociological and political problems, he often attended at Williams College the conferences of the Institute of Politics, speaking on the affairs of Latin America, Russia, and Germany, countries with which he was so well acquainted. He died from pneumonia, in Queens, New York. He was buried in Rockford, Ill.

Achievements

• Ruhl was known as the leading journalist at his times. He contributed a lot of his writings to various papers and magazines, such as Herald Tribune, Collier's, the Survey, the American Mercury, and especially the Saturday Review of Literature, which considered him one of its most valued writers. As a reporter he was described as one who meticulously observed the facts and then retired to write dispassionately and objectively of what he had seen. His interest in the modern theatre led him not only to analyze and evaluate the plays which he reviewed for the New York Herald Tribune, but to study carefully their origin and background.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Rowing and Track Athletics

    (This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)

  • New Masters of the Baltic (Classic Reprint)

    (The four new republics on the eastern Baltic Finland, Est...)

  • ANTWERP TO GALLIPOLI - A Year of the War on Many Fronts - and Behind Them Illustrated Edition

    (Includes Gallipoli Campaign Map and Illustrations Pack -7...)

  • An Eye in the Storm: An American War Correspondent's Experiences of the First World War from the Western Front to Gallipoli-And Beyond

    (A singular view of the Great War on many fronts At the ou...)

  • White nights: and other Russian impressions

    (This book was digitized and reprinted from the collection...)

  • Second Nights; People and Ideas of the Theatre To-day

    (This is a pre-1923 historical reproduction that was curat...)

  • The Central Americans;: Adventures and impressions between Mexico and Panama,

    (Hardcover. 1st ed. NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1928. Unm...)

  • A break in training: And other athletic stories
  • The Other Americans: The Cities, the Countries, and Especially (Classic Reprint)

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• The Saturday Review spoke of him as "a veteran reporter of much that has now become history. "

Interests

• Sport & Clubs

  Athletics

Connections

Ruhl married on June 11, 1926, Zinaida Yakovnchikoff, a Russian exile, who had once belonged to the landed aristocracy. He had a son, Arthur Paul Ruhl.

Father:

Antes Schoch Ruhl

Mother:

Nellie (Brown) Ruhl

Spouse:

Zinaida Yakovnchikoff

Son:

Arthur Paul Ruhl