Gladys Hasty Carroll collection

Born in 1904 in South Berwick, Maine, Gladys Hasty Carroll grew up and lived most of her life in the farmhouse her grandfather built during the Civil War in Dunnybrook. She attended Bates College, earning a B.A. in English in 1925 and an honorary degree in 1945. Her husband, Herbert A. Carroll was a psychologist, and because of his work the two lived in Massachusetts, New York, Illinois, and Minnesota, where she began to write magazine articles and books. Her first novel was As The Earth Turns (1933), which was a Book-of-the-Month selection, nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, and made into a feature length movie in 1934. The University of New Hampshire also awarded her an honorary master in arts in 1934. She wrote 26 books over her lifetime, including fiction, nonfiction, short stories, and children’s books. She is best known for her ability to capture a fading way of life among Maine’s rural farm communities. Inspired by her life at the farmhouse, Carroll also wrote Dunnybrook (1943), a fictional history and genealogy of South Berwick. Other notable works include To Remember Forever 1922-1923 (1963), Only Fifty Years Ago (1962), and The Light Here Kindled (1967). She was on the Breadloaf staff; she took courses at Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago; and Westbrook College honored her with the Deborah Morton Award for Distinguished Maine Women in 1987. In her later years, Carroll founded the Dunnybrook Historical Foundation of South Berwick. She died on April 1, 1999.