After the death of her husband, the Austrian intellectual and social democrat politician Gustav Scheu [de], as she was of Jewish heritage, in 1937 she moved to the United States.

She founded Open Sesame Inc. New York in 1949 to continue her philanthropic work of distributing world literature as a means of promoting internationalism and peace.

[1][2][3] She attended the Mädchengymnasium des Vereins für Erweiterte Frauenbildung, a private high school established to allow girls to take the matura examination which was required for university entrance.

[7][8] She also became interested in the settlement movement, which focused on providing housing, employment assistance, language instruction, and medical care for urban poor and immigrant residents.

[11] As early as 1900, together with Yella Hertzka, Margarethe Jodl, Marie Lang and Dora von Stockert-Meynert she founded the Viennese Women's Club (Erster Wiener Frauenklub).

[13][14] Scheu-Riesz and her husband gained a central position in Viennese society thanks to their salon, to which they invited local and international celebrities, including the composers Alban Berg, Anton Webern and Arnold Schönberg, the painter Oskar Kokoschka, the actresses Elisabeth Neumann-Viertel and Helene Weigel, the architect Adolf Loos, who designed her house in Hietzing, and the educational innovator Eugenie Schwarzwald.

The beautifully illustrated collection focused on fairy tales and children's stories in German which cost far less than the poorly presented editions which were appearing in the shops for Christmas at horrendous prices.

[16] From the time of her teenage visit to London, she had tried to find a publisher interested in producing inexpensive, high-quality literature for children and young people.

[31] After moving to the United States, she continued to work with WILPF, through the North Carolina branch, giving lectures to women's groups.

[16] Among her many translations were poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and numerous children's stories and fairy tales from China, Estonia, Great Britain, Japan, Spain, Sweden, and the United States, among other places.

[33] Her first novel in English, Gretchen Discovers America (1934) was a romance about a German girl who came to the United States and found love in the interwar period.

[35] Despite a large number of reprints of her version, the genre of deliberate literary nonsense was virtually unknown in Germany and faced criticism as to whether it was appropriate for children.

[40] As a widow, despite becoming a member of the Protestant church, she was concerned that her Jewish heritage would present problems with the Nazis who were gaining popularity in Austria.

(1940), a collection of proposal letters from historical figures, and Those Funny Grownups (1943), a satirical examination of adult behavior from a child's perspective.

[47][48] In order to establish the firm, which intended to reproduce classic literature at low cost and distribute those volumes through United World Books, she solicited contributions from contemporary authors and sold high-priced, limited editions of their autographed and illustrated works.

Reviewers noted that the book gave insight into marriage proposals in different periods of society and the way that language has been used to either charm a beloved, or make a business arrangement.