Ruth Nanda Anshen (1900–2003)

Ruth Nanda Anshen was born in Lynn, Massachusetts. Her mother Sarah Yaffe Anshen was a poet. She earned a PhD in philosophy at Boston University in the late 1930s, working Alfred North Whitehead. In 1940, she began editing the Science of Culture series, which for two decades brought together essays by thinkers such as Albert Einstein, Margaret Mead, Jonas Salk, and Thomas Mann. She also edited the Perspectives in Humanism, Religious Perspective, and World Perspective series, as well as a 30-volume collection of autobiographies called Credo Perspectives.