13 Facts About Laura Riding

Laura Riding was born in New York City to Nathaniel Reichenthal, a Jewish immigrant from Galicia, and Sadie, and educated at Cornell University.

Laura Riding met historian Louis R Gottschalk, then a graduate assistant at Cornell, and they married in 1920.

Laura Riding began to write poetry, publishing first under the name Laura Riding Gottschalk.

Laura Riding became associated with the Fugitives through Allen Tate, and they published her poems in The Fugitive magazine.

Laura Riding would remain in Europe for nearly fourteen years.

When Laura Riding met the Irish poet, Geoffrey Phibbs, in 1929, she invited him to join the household that already contained herself, Graves, and Graves's wife, Nancy.

Graves and Laura Riding left Majorca in 1936, at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

Laura Riding withdrew from public literary life, working with Schuyler Jackson on a dictionary that would lead them into an exploration of the foundations of meaning and language.

Writings and publications continued to flow throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties, as Laura Jackson explored what she regarded as the truth-potential of language, free from the artificial restrictions of poetic art.

Laura Riding might be regarded as a spiritual teacher whose unusually high valuation of language, led her to choose literature as the locus of her work.

Laura Riding died of cardiac arrest on September 2,1991.

Laura Riding's poems had many detractors, such as John Gould Fletcher, William Carlos Williams, Virginia Woolf, Louise Bogan, Dorothy L Sayers and Dudley Fitts.

Laura Riding's works have been translated to French, German, Spanish, Danish, Polish, Portuguese and Norwegian.