Biography
Ruby Hart was born to John Hart, a cattle merchant, in 1900 in Oklahoma. As a young woman, she moved around Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico, and enrolled in half a dozen schools. Eventually she learned basic secretarial skills in a Dallas business school, then held a series of miscellaneous jobs. She decided to leave the Southwest and moved to Cuba, where she took a job at Westinghouse Electric.
In Havana she met and married James Doyle Phillips, another American expatriate. Phillips learned journalism from James, who began contributing to the New York Times in 1931. After James was killed in a stateside car accident in 1937, the Times allowed Phillips to take over as foreign correspondent in Cuba, despite the fact she had virtually no journalistic experience. Phillips used the byline "R. Hart Phillips" to disguise that she was a woman, since female foreign correspondents were highly unusual at the time. She wrote several books about Cuba.
Read more about this topic: Ruby Hart Phillips
Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“As we approached the log house,... the projecting ends of the logs lapping over each other irregularly several feet at the corners gave it a very rich and picturesque look, far removed from the meanness of weather-boards. It was a very spacious, low building, about eighty feet long, with many large apartments ... a style of architecture not described by Vitruvius, I suspect, though possibly hinted at in the biography of Orpheus.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“Just how difficult it is to write biography can be reckoned by anybody who sits down and considers just how many people know the real truth about his or her love affairs.”
—Rebecca West [Cicily Isabel Fairfield] (1892–1983)