Rukeyser was active in progressive politics throughout her life. At age 21, she covered the Scottsboro case in Alabama, then worked for the International Labor Defense, which handled the defendants' appeals. She wrote for the "Daily Worker" and a variety of publications, including "Decision" and "Life & Letters Today", for which she covered the People's Olympiad (Olimpiada Popular, Barcelona), the Catalan government's alternative to the Nazis' 1936 Berlin Olympics. While she was in Spain, the Spanish Civil War broke out, the basis of her book "Mediterranean". Most famously, she traveled to Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, to investigate the recurring silicosis among miners there, which resulted in her poem sequence "The Book of the Dead". During and after World War II, she gave a number of striking public lectures, published in her "The Life of Poetry" (excerpts here). For much of her life, she taught university classes and led workshops, but she never became a career academic.