About Nancy Rubin Stuart

Nancy Rubin Stuart is an award-winning author and journalist who specializes in women, biography and social history. 

At nine years of age she wrote her first “book” about her dog and neighborhood friends. As a teenager she appeared in a professional ballet company. “Neither ballet nor my reddish hair were fashionable then,” Nancy recalls. “Perhaps being a little different has something to do with becoming a writer, that sense of the outsider, the observer.” 

Born in Boston, Nancy graduated from Tufts University with a B.A. in English and an M.A.T. from Brown University. In 1995, Mount Vernon College, now part of Georgetown University, awarded her an honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters. 

While raising children, Nancy wrote for the New York Times under the byline Nancy Rubin. That work and her experiences as a suburban wife and mother prompted her first book,The New Suburban Woman: Beyond Myth and Motherhood.

Subsequent books under that byline were The Mother Mirror: How a Generation of Women Is Changing Motherhood in America;  Isabella of Castile: The First Renaissance Queen, and the best-selling American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post.

Nancy also wrote for the A & E Network’s series “America’s Castles” and for HGTV’s series “Restore America.” In 2005 Harcourt published her biography on the co-founder of American spiritualism,The Reluctant Spiritualist: The Life of Maggie Fox which won an Outstanding Book Award for Nonfiction from the American Society of Authors and Journalists. 

Nancy received the American Antiquarian Society’s William Randolph Hearst Award for research leading to Beacon Press’s publication of The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation in 2008. That book won the 2009 Historic Winslow House Book Award and was a finalist in USA Today Book News 2010 “Best Book” Awards. 

Other honors include three Telly Awards from the cable television industry, the 1992 Author of the Year Award from the American Society of Authors and Journalists, the Washington Irving Award from the Westchester Library System, a Time, Inc. scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and a fellowship from the MacDowell Colony. 

Nancy has appeared on C-Span’s BookTV, the A & E Series “Mansions, Monuments and Masterpieces” and “America’s Castles,” on Oprah, on CBS Morning News, the Charlie Rose Show, C-Span’s BookTV, and the History Channel. Listeners have also heard on  National Public Radio and on several podcasts.

Nancy often speaks at colleges, book clubs, women’s organizations and before a wide variety of audiences, ranging from Mensa International to the Palm Beach Society of the Four Arts to Manhattan’s National Arts Club. 

As a journalist, she has written for many publications including The New York Times, American History Magazine, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The New England Quarterly, The Huffington Post, The Stamford Advocate, Greenwich Time, The Barnstable Patriot, The Cape Cod Times, Business Week’s Careers, Family Circle, Parents, and others listed on the Bookshelf page. 

Today Nancy also serves as Executive Director of the Cape Cod Writers Center.

In 2022 Beacon Press published her latest book, POOR RICHARD’S WOMEN; Deborah Read Franklin and the Other Women Behind the Founding Father. 

Nancy Rubin Stuart

Reviews

Reader Reviews

On The Reluctant Spiritualist

The Reluctant Spiritualist is non-fiction but reads like a fast-paced whodunit. The mystery is whether spiritualism is a fact, or a fraud cooked up by two bored teenage girls in a farmhouse in mid-nineteenth century upstate New York.
Stuart Ellison

On Defiant Brides

For the lover of American history, this was a great book… The work was well annotated, and researched, easy and enjoyable to read and comprehend. Recommend for those who enjoy lite history biographies and women’s studies.
goodreads

On The Muse of the Revolution

A fascinating & entertaining account about one of America’s forgotten outstanding women. I learned far more about the American Revolution and how it affected ordinary people by reading The Muse of the Revolution than I ever learned in my American history class.
L.S. – Manhattan

On ​Isabella of Castile

Nancy Rubin makes use of Prescott and in a sense pours old wine in new bottles. Her Isabella is more accessible than Prescott’s pius queen. She also very ably puts Isabella in the proper perspective as the co-founder of modern Spain (at least from a geographic perspective)… but as Ms. Rubin’s book ably demonstrates, she was much more than that.
M.A. Newman

On American Empress

A fascinating & entertaining account about one of America’s forgotten outstanding women. I learned far more about the American Revolution and how it affected ordinary people by reading The Muse of the Revolution than I ever learned in my American history class.
Sonia Ibanez