Among the work she did find in this period was the first pictorial book jacket for the Modern Library ( Alice in Wonderland, 1932). Graduating from Parsons in 1929, as the Great Depression was beginning, she found it difficult to get work as an illustrator. In 1927, she decided to enroll at the Parsons School of Design in New York. Ruth's father died in late 1921, requiring Ruth to drop out of school. She was considered a gifted but undisciplined musician by her teachers. After the camp, she spent some time studying violin in the Peabody Institute of Music's preparatory program. Her next stop was a girls camp, Camp Walden in Maine, where she discovered her love for writing the camp yearbook for 1919 contains her first published piece of writing. The school's focus on applied arts did not suit her and she left after about a year. She enrolled in the Maryland Institute for the Promotion of the Mechanic Arts (now known as the Maryland Institute College of Art). Ruth went to a local high school but left in 1917 after her sophomore year to focus on the study of art.

She began writing and illustrating her own stories while still a child, hand sewing her pages into books. As a child, Ruth had numerous health problems, including the rare autoimmune disorder pemphigus. Ruth Krauss was born July 25, 1901, in Baltimore, Maryland to Julius Leopold and Blanche Krauss. Ruth Ida Krauss (J– July 10, 1993) was an American writer of children's books, including The Carrot Seed, and of theatrical poems for adult readers.

The Carrot Seed by Ruth Krauss