Ruby Cohn was a theater scholar and a leading authority on playwright Samuel Beckett

Samuel Beckett

Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet. He wrote both in English and French. His work offers a bleak, tragicomic outlook on human nature, often coupled with black comedy and gallows humour.Beckett is widely regarded as among the most...

. She was a professor of Comparative Drama at the University of California, Davis

University of California, Davis

The University of California, Davis is a public teaching and research university established in 1905 and located in Davis, California, USA. Spanning over , the campus is the largest within the University of California system and third largest by enrollment...

 for thirty years.

Early life and education

Born in 1922 in Columbus, Ohio

Columbus, Ohio

Columbus is the capital of and the largest city in the U.S. state of Ohio. The broader metropolitan area encompasses several counties and is the third largest in Ohio behind those of Cleveland and Cincinnati. Columbus is the third largest city in the American Midwest, and the fifteenth largest city...

, Cohn moved with her family to New York City, where she completed high school and graduated from Hunter College

Hunter College

Hunter College, established in 1870, is a public university and one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York, located on Manhattan's Upper East Side. Hunter grants undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate degrees in more than one hundred fields of study, and is recognized...

. During World War II

World War II

World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...

 she joined the WAVES

WAVES

The WAVES were a World War II-era division of the U.S. Navy that consisted entirely of women. The name of this group is an acronym for "Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service" ; the word "emergency" implied that the acceptance of women was due to the unusual circumstances of the war and...

 and served as a document courier. After the war she returned to Europe and competed a doctoral degree at the University of Paris

University of Paris

The University of Paris was a university located in Paris, France and one of the earliest to be established in Europe. It was founded in the mid 12th century, and officially recognized as a university probably between 1160 and 1250...

. In January 1953 while a student at the Sorbonne

Sorbonne

The Sorbonne is an edifice of the Latin Quarter, in Paris, France, which has been the historical house of the former University of Paris...

 she attended the first public performance of En Attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), by a then obscure Irish-born dramatist, Samuel Beckett. The play and its author became the focus of the rest of her academic life. She married microbiologist Melvin Cohn in 1946, moving with him to St. Louis. She earned a second doctorate from Washington University in St. Louis with a dissertation on Beckett which became her first book. She and her husband were amicably divorced in 1961.

Academic career

Cohn joined the Language Arts faculty of San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University

San Francisco State University is a public university located in San Francisco, California. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers over 100 areas of study from nine academic colleges...

in 1961 and taught until her resignation during the student strike of 1968. She joined the theater faculty of the California Institute of the Arts in 1969, and moved to the University of California, Davis in 1972. Through her scholarship she became friends with Beckett, exchanging letters and visiting each other at least annually until his death in 1989.

Books authored

• With Samuel Beckett, Samuel Beckett: The Comic Gamut (1962; Literary Licensing, 2011) ISBN 978-1258154134
• Editor, with Bernard Dukore and Haskell Block, Twentieth Century Drama: England, Ireland, the United States (Random House, 1966) ISBN 978-0394301419
• Editor, Casebook on 'Waiting for Godot' (Grove Press, 1967) ISBN 978-0394172668
• Back to Beckett, 1974
• Samuel Beckett: A Collection of Criticism (McGraw-Hill, 1975) ISBN 978-0070115989
• Just Play: Beckett's Theater, 1980
• With Samuel Beckett, Disjecta: Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment (Grove Press, 1984) ISBN 978-0802151292
• New American Dramatists, 1960-1990 (Palgrave Macmillan, 1991) ISBN 978-0312042493
• From Desire to Godot (Calder Publications, 1999) ISBN 978-0714542874
• A Beckett Canon (2001; University of Michigan Press, 2005) ISBN 978-0472031313
• Anglo-American Interplay in Recent Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2006) ISBN 978-0521035286
• Retreats from Realism in Recent English Drama (Cambridge University Press, 2009) ISBN 978-0521106931