Gladys Hasty Carroll

Gladys Hasty Carroll (June 26, 1904 – April 1, 1999) was an American novelist active from the late 1920s into the 1980s. In her fiction and non-fiction, Carroll wrote about what she knew and people that she loved, especially those in the Southern Maine rural community of Dunnybrook, located in South Berwick, Maine. Carroll believed that the history of common folk mattered most and her works presented their stories.

Carroll's debut novel As the Earth Turns featured one year on a local family farm. In 1933 it was a blockbuster—released by Macmillan on May 2 with advanced sales of 20,000 and as the Book-of-the-Month Club selection for May. In 1996 it was "read and discussed by informal study groups and in classrooms throughout the state" as part of a Maine Humanities Council project on "the impact of modernism on Maine". She grew up on her family's South Berwick farm, where she lived with her parents, Warren Verd Hasty and Emma Frances Dow, brother Harold, grandfather George Bradford Hasty, and a paternal aunt named Vinnie.

As a child young Gladys Hasty attended a one-room school house. To keep her occupied after she finished assignments, teachers told her to write on any topic she wished. She graduated from Berwick Academy and then matriculated to Bates College, the first person in her family to pursue higher education. Bates friends nicknamed her "Sunny" because of her optimistic personality.

On the day following her graduation in 1925, she married Herbert Allen Carroll in the Bates College chapel. The marriage lasted 58 years, until his death in April 1983. Herbert Carroll's career and pursuits of various degrees took the couple all over America including Massachusetts, Chicago, Minneapolis and Manhattan. They had two children, a son Warren Carroll born in 1932 and a daughter, Sarah, in 1942. (Warren graduated from Bates College in 1953 and died in July 2011; Sarah graduated from Bates College in 1962 and died in August 2011. )

This period marked Carroll's emergence into international prominence as an author. She worked tirelessly, writing short stories, regular advice columns and her novels Cockatoo (1929) and Landspell (1930). In 1933 she wrote her Pulitzer Prize-nominated work of fiction, As the Earth Turns.

Books

Cockatoo (Macmillan, 1929), unpaged picture book illustrated by Robert Crowther, Land Spell (Macmillan, 1930), illus. William Siegel, for children As the Earth Turns (Macmillan, 1933) – "one year in the life of a Maine farm family", A Few Foolish Ones (Macmillan, 1935) Neighbor to the Sky (Macmillan, 1937) Head of the Line (Macmillan, 1942), collection Dunnybrook (Macmillan, 1943) – "a social history of 10 generations of farmers in her community" The Road Grows Strange (Little, Brown, 1965) The Light Here Kindled (Little, Brown, 1967) Christmas Through the Years (Little, Brown, 1968), collection Man on the Mountain (Little, Brown, 1969) Years Away from Home (Little, Brown, 1972), memoir and correspondence Next of Kin (Little, Brown, 1974) Unless You Die Young (W. W. Norton, 1977) The Book That Came Alive (Portland: G. Gannett Publ., 1979), The Wings of Berwick Academy: Over the township of South Berwick and its neighbors (Late 1800s and early 1900s) (South Berwick: Dunnybrook Historical Foundation, 1992),