I WENT TO THE SOVIET ARCTIC [Signed] by Gruber, Ruth, 1911-2016 [author]; Stefansson, Vilhjalmur [preface] - 1939

New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939. First edition. Hardcover. Slightly cocked; minor wear to board tips; else tight and clean. No jacket.. Quarto in polished dark grey-blue cloth; x, 333, [1] pages 25 cm. Map on lining-papers. Inscribed "Warmest arctic wishes" by the author. "Ruth Gruber (1911 - 2016) was an American journalist, photographer, writer, humanitarian, and United States government official. Born in Brooklyn to Russian Jewish immigrants, she was encouraged to pursue her dream of becoming a writer. At age 20, she received a doctorate from the University of Cologne in Germany, which was awarded for her dissertation -- in German -- on Virginia Woolf. In the 1930s, she established herself as a journalist writing about women under fascism and communism, traveling as far as the Soviet Arctic. She also served two years in Alaska as a field representative of the U.S. Department of the Interior. As World War II raged in Europe, she turned her attention to the crisis of Jewish refugees: acting on… Read More

VIKING PRESS, 1944. Hardcover. Good. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.Dust jacket quality is not guaranteed.

New York: Simon and Schuster. Near Fine in Very Good+ dj. 1939. First Edition. Hardcover. [very nice copy, the book itself just lightly worn at the spine ends and bottom corners (actually a review copy, with the original publisher's reply postcard laid in); jacket has just one tiny chip and a couple of itsy-bitsy tears at the bottom of the front panel, light soiling on the rear panel]. The first book by this veteran journalist and photographer, who went on assignment from the New York Herald Tribune (for whom she had been reporting since 1932) to investigate "the status of women in the Soviet Union." In the course of her travels she covered 6,000 miles by plane and boat, making observations and conducting "countless interviews with all classes and types from high government officials to Trotskyists and exiled kulaks." Ms. Gruber, who lived to the grand old age of 105 (she died in 2016), was deeply involved during and immediately after World War II with the… Read More

New York: Simon & Schuster, 1939. First Edition. Just a trifle shelf-rubbed; fine in a boldly pictorial dust jacket with a closed tear to the front hinge, minor chipping to the corners. A handsome copy.. 8vo, 333pp; blue cloth with printed spine label. The first commercially published book in Gruber's extraordinary long career. In 1932 she published her dissertation -- the first feminist study of Virginia Woolf -- before turning to journalism, where she made her lasting mark. As both a writer and photographer, Gruber covered, among other events, the rise of the Nazis in Germany, life in Stalin's gulags (in this book), the development of the Alaskan territory, the plight of Jewish refugees from Hitler, the formation of Israel, and the varied waves of migration to the new state. This copy has been inscribed and signed by Gruber on the first leaf: "To William Vaughey, Jr., Who may someday go the Arctic -- and love it. Ruth Gruber, April 26, 1940." The book includes a foreword by the explorer Vilhjalmur… Read More