Ruth Lechlitner was born near and grew up in Mishawaka, Indiana. After she graduated from high school, her parents moved to Lansing, Michigan. She received her A.B. from the University of Michigan in 1923. For the next two years she taught high school English in New Mexico. Lechlitner was offered a scholarship to the University of Iowa, based upon the several poems she had written and had published in such respected journals as Poetry. While at Iowa she worked as the assistant editor of The Midland (edited by John T. Frederick and Frank Luther Mott). The Midland published several more of Lechlitner’s poems. She received her M.A. in 1926.

Moving to New York City, she became an editorial assistant at The Nation. In 1928, Lechlitner married the author, Paul Corey, whom she had met at Iowa. After a year of traveling abroad, they settled in Cold Spring-on-Hudson, New York. There they built their own home and weathered the Great Depression as free-lance writers and chicken farmers. Their only child, Anne, was born in 1941. In 1947, they moved to Sonoma, California, again building their own home. Ruth Lechlitner continued to write and publish poetry while supplementing their income by working as a substitute teacher.

She published three books of poetry: Tomorrow’s Phoenix, 1937; Only the Years, 1944; and The Shadow of the Hour, 1956. (Copies of these books may be found in the Special Collections Department of the University of Iowa Libraries). She also had two radio dramas produced in addition to her poems which appeared in such respected journals as Poetry, The New Yorker, The Saturday Review, Harper’s Bazaar, and The Nation. She was working on another collection of poetry, tentatively titled Through the Glass Darkly, when she became ill. Ruth Lechlitner died on November 9, 1989, after a long illness.