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".

Carroll was born June 26, 1904 in Rochester, New Hampshire. 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.

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. It was a blockbuster success and the second best selling novel of 1933 according to Publishers Weekly, second only to Hervey Allen's Anthony Adverse and outselling such well-remembered books as Lloyd C. Douglas's Magnificent Obsession and Sinclair Lewis's Ann Vickers. A Warner Bros. film version of the novel starring Jean Muir and Donald Woods was a flop, however, and none of Carroll's other novels were ever filmed. The only other film adaption of any of her work was her story "Kristi," which was made into an episode of Jane Wyman's 1950s anthology television series Fireside Theatre.

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