[2] In 1946, at the end of World War II, Ruas and his brothers, Franklin and Alex, were repatriated with their mother to Paris, where she was recruited to join the United Nations in New York.

After his first year of teaching, he took a summer trip to North Africa and Europe, where he met his future wife, Agneta Danielsson, who was also traveling from her native Sweden.

[3] The readers came from a wide variety of artistic and literary backgrounds—including Anaïs Nin, Marian Seldes, Osceola Macarthy Adams, Wyatt Cooper, Ruth Ford, and Owen Dodson, among others.

In the course of this series, Ruas became Director of Arts and Literature programming at WBAI, New York's main platform for the Civil Rights Movements, the anti-Vietnam-war protests and the 1960s counterculture.

To Courtney Callender's weekly Getting Around show covering the culture scene,[4] Ruas added Moira Hodgson's features on dance and visual arts coverage by a combination of critics and artists, including John Perreault, Cindy Nemser, Liza Baer, Joe Giordano, Judith Vivell, Kenneth Koch and Les Levine.

[6][7] After the Marguerite Young Reading Experiment series, Ruas presented a rebroadcast of poets Ed Friedman, Helen Adam, and Patti Smith performing at Ira Weitzman's Free Music Store in June 1975.

[12] Together with Susan Howe, Anne Waldman, and Maureen Owens, he initiated annual coverage of St. Mark's Church’s New Year's Eve poetry marathon.

[20] Other programming on contemporary fiction featured Maxine Hong Kingston, Ed Sanders,[21] E.L. Doctorow,[22] John Gardner, Nadine Gordimer, and Richard Adams, to name a few.

When Tennessee Williams was under attack by critics during the last years of his life, Ruas defended him by covering his Memoirs, his novel Moise and the World of Reason[32] and broadcasting a production of Two-Character Play[33] and In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel.

The series presented works adapted for radio by Meredith Monk,[36] Yvonne Rainer,[37] Richard Foreman, Ed Bowes,[38] Vito Acconci, Charles Ludlam, and Robert Wilson and Philip Glass,[39] among others.

In 1985, Knopf published Conversations with American Writers, collecting Ruas's most notable interviews with literary figures of the 1960s, 70s and 80s, including Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Eudora Welty, Susan Sontag, and Toni Morrison, among others.

In 1992, when China reopened to the outside world post-Cultural Revolution, Ruas returned as a Fulbright Professor of American Literature and Civilization to Nankai University in Tianjin, his birthplace.

While serving as a professor for two years, he connected with the family of his mother's friend, Grace Divine Liu, the American wife of his father's Chinese colleague.

Upon his return to New York from China, Ruas was asked to edit the unfinished manuscript of Marguerite Young's monumental biography of labor leader Eugene Victor Debs, the first Socialist candidate for President of the United States, who ran against Woodrow Wilson from prison during WWI.

[50] The second was Tuszinska's autobiographical Family History in Fear, about discovering her Jewish identity and tracing anti-Semetic persecution and survival during World War II, and under Communism.