Alice von Hildebrand was born in Vienna, Austria, in 1921. She was a student at the University of Vienna when the Nazis came to power in 1938. She resisted their efforts to force her into a convent and fled with her parents to England in 1940 where they were granted asylum. In 1943, they left England for the United States where Alice completed her undergraduate studies at Columbia University and then studied at Union Theological Seminary in New York City
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In 1952, she married the Rev. Herbert Ritter, an Austrian expatriate priest who had met her there in 1941. Together they founded the Institute for Religious Works (now the "Institute for Eternal Life") which continues to this day in San Diego, California, under Alice's leadership (www.iellc.org).
Alice's books include The Road to Reunion (New York: Harper & Row, 1955), Devotion (San Francisco: Ignatius Press), and Eternal Life (San Francisco: Ignatius Press). For her work in bringing Catholic teaching on eternal life to Protestant readers (an endeavor she began when she wrote The Road to Reunion), she received the 1962 Guggenheim Fellowship and the 1963 Distinguished Service Award from the American Catholic Philosophical Association.