Max Ritvo

In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished, two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, intensely curious and intensely gifted poet in remission from paediatric cancer. Over the next four years—in which Ritvo's illness returned and his health began to decline, even as his productivity bloomed—the two traded a...