Gladys Hasty Carroll
Gladys Hasty Carroll was an American author born on June 26, 1904, in Rochester, New Hampshire. Raised in a farmhouse in Dunnybrook, Maine, she found her passion for writing inspired by her rural upbringing. After attending Bates College, where she met and married Herbert A. Carroll, she began her literary career. Her early works targeted juvenile audiences, but her third book, *As the Earth Turns* (1933), marked a significant turning point. This novel, celebrated for its portrayal of rural Maine life during the Great Depression, became a bestseller and was translated into sixty languages. Despite some criticism for its sentimentalism, it was recognized for its honest representation of reality. Carroll's literary achievements included over thirty published books and several educational degrees, culminating in a Ph.D. from the University of Maine. She continued to live and write in the homestead she cherished until her passing on April 1, 1999. Carroll's work remains a testament to the beauty of everyday life in rural America.
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Subject Terms
Gladys Hasty Carroll
- Born: June 26, 1904
- Birthplace: Rochester, New Hampshire
- Died: April 1, 1999
- Place of death: York, Maine
Biography
Gladys Hasty Carroll was born June 26, 1904, in Rochester, New Hampshire, daughter of Warren Verdi Hasty and Frances (Dow) Hasty. Shortly thereafter, the family moved to the farmhouse her grandfather built in Dunnybrook, Maine during the Civil War. Nearby Berwick Academy (the alma mater of nineteenth century writer Sarah Orne Jewett) prepared her for college study, and in 1921 she enrolled in Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. There she met and fell in love with a psychology student named Herbert A. Carroll. He graduated at the end of her sophomore year in 1923, but they corresponded while he pursued graduate study. The day after she received her A.B. from Bates in June of 1925, they were married at the college chapel.
Professor Herbert Carroll’s first teaching post was at the University of Minnesota, so the young bride left the only home she had ever known in rural Maine. To quiet her homesickness for rural Maine, she began writing stories about it. Her first book, Cockatoo (1928), and her second, Land Spell (1929), were aimed at juvenile audiences. Her third, book, however, sought an adult audience, and it became her most successful work.
As the Earth Turns (1933) is Carroll’s masterpiece. Telling the bucolic rapture of life in rural Maine, with no trace of irony, Carroll’s novel was dismissed by modernists as mere sentimentalism and nostalgia, especially considering it was written at the height of the Great Depression. In fact, the book embodied honest realism, recording the sunny side of real life which the other “realists” often ignored. Carroll’s instincts for the truth were justified: The novel became an instant best seller, was translated into sixty languages, and was reprinted by the White House Library of American Books, a series of one hundred books given to dignitaries of foreign countries to portray America through its literature.
Warner Brothers bought the film rights to As the Earth Turns right away, and in 1935 released a movie version. The people of Dunnybrook, the small town in which the film was set, felt that the film did not capture their story as Carroll had, so they acted it out themselves in an outdoor drama staged each year for a decade or so after 1936.
While continuing to write successful fiction, Carroll continued her literary studies, earning her M.A. from the University of New Hampshire in 1934, and her Ph.D. from the University of Maine in 1940. When Carroll died on April 1, 1999, at her grandfather’s homestead, she had published more than thirty books spanning eight decades, most of them detailing the daily life of rural Maine that she loved so much.