Born Robert C. Ruark, Jr., to Charlotte A. Ruark and Robert C. Ruark, a bookkeeper for a wholesale grocery, young Ruark attended local schools and graduated from New Hanover High School in Wilmington, North Carolina. He graduated from high school at age 12 and entered the University of North Carolina at age 15. The Ruark family was deeply affected by the Depression, but despite his families' financial travails, he earned a journalism degree from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In the 1930s he was fired from an accounting job in the Works Progress Administration and did a hitch in the United States Merchant Marine. Ruark worked for two small town newspapers in North Carolina, the Hamlet News Messenger and later the Sanford Herald. Ruark had an adoptive brother named David, about whom little is known.
In 1936 he moved to Washington, D.C., and was hired as a copy boy for The Washington Daily News, a Scripps-Howard newspaper. In just a few months he was the paper's top sports reporter. During World War II Ruark was commissioned an ensign in the United States Navy. Ruark served ten months as a gunnery officer on Atlantic and Mediterranean convoys.
Upon his return to Washington, Ruark joined the Scripps-Howard Newspaper Alliance. As the New York Times said, Ruark was "sometimes glad, sometimes sad, and often mad--but almost always provocative." Some of his columns were eventually collected into two books, I Didn't Know It Was Loaded (1948) and One for the Road (1949).
As he grew in notoriety, Ruark began to write fiction; first for literary magazines, and then his first novel, Grenadine Etching in 1947. The novel parodied the popular historical romances of time and set the stage for his many humorous novels and articles published in the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, and other popular publications.
In 1953, Ruark began writing a series for Field & Stream magazine entitled The Old Man and the Boy. Considered largely autobiographical (although technically fiction), this heartwarming series ran until late 1961. Many of the articles in the series were collected into a book of the same name, followed shortly thereafter by another companion book entitled The Old Man's Boy Grows Older. The stories were punctuated by the philosophical musings of the Old Man, who was a character modeled after both of Ruark's grandfathers, though based mostly on Ned Adkins, Ruark's maternal grandfather. In the stories, young Bob Ruark grows up hunting and fishing in coastal North Carolina, always guided by the Old Man. However, the pain of his parents' difficult domestic life and his relatively few childhood friends - Ruark, something of a child prodigy in school, was a loner - are tellingly absent from the stories. Today these two books are his best remembered works; his other novels are long out of print.
Ruark's first bestselling novel was published in 1955. It was entitled Something of Value and was about the Mau Mau Uprising by Kenyan rebels against the British rule. The novel drew from the author's personal knowledge and experiences on safari in Africa and was adapted into a successful 1957 film, Something of Value. Later [1962], Ruark delivered Uhuru, a continuing and similar theme, but not intended to be a sequel. "Uhuru" is the Swahili word for freedom. He had intended to write a final chapter in the series with the working title of A Long View From a Tall Hill, but this never materialized.
After he began to gain success as a writer, Ruark decided that it was time to fulfill a lifelong dream to go on safari to Africa. Legendary Ker and Downey Safaris booked him with Harry Selby, and Ruark began a love affair with Africa. It is interesting to note that Ruark was booked with Selby because of a desire to use a tracker named Kidogo, who had hunted with Ernest Hemingway on an earlier safari. Ruark's pairing with Selby, though fortuitous, was merely luck. Kidogo was a member of Selby's crew.
As a result of this first safari, Ruark wrote a book called Horn of the Hunter, in which he detailed his hunt. Selby became an overnight legend and was subsequently booked for up to five years in advance by Americans wishing to duplicate Ruark's adventures. After the first safari, Selby and Ruark again went out hunting, and this time they took cameras along. The result was a one hour documentary entitled Africa Adventure, released by RKO pictures. Though extremely difficult to find, a 16mm print of this movie was discovered in around 2002 and a DVD copy was created and donated to the Robert Ruark Foundation in Southport, North Carolina.
After his first half dozen books or so, Ruark continued to write, though few of his subsequent novels surpassed his early successes. Ruark moved to Palamos, Spain in 1960 after a bittersweet visit to his hometown of Wilmington, North Carolina. On leaving the U.S., he wrote (according to humorist and author Allan Sherman in his book The Rape of the A*P*E) a scathing farewell note to America, which appeared in Playboy and was titled "Nothing Works and Nobody Cares." He died in London, England on July 1, 1965 most likely as a result of alcoholism. His last novel, The Honey Badger, exemplified the personal condition of the author at this time in his life. Indeed, this book was published posthumously, as was Use Enough Gun, which is essentially a collection of segments from his earlier works. More notable are the two collections published by McIntosh and Casada, both of which are quite representative of Ruark's finest work.
In 1938 Ruark married Virginia Webb, an interior designer from an upper middle-class family in the Washington, D.C. area and a graduate of Georgetown University. Married for over 20 years, they had no children and divorced in 1963. Virginia Webb-Ruark died in 1966.
