author

Katharine Butler

Known for a vivid memoir published after her death, this American writer turned a childhood marked by illness into a book remembered for its wit, courage, and sharp eye for everyday life. Her story is closely tied to coastal Maine, where she found independence and the setting that shaped her best-known work.

1 Audiobook

Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories

Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories

by Elizabeth Ashe, Katharine Butler, Henry Seidel Canby, Cornelia A. P. (Cornelia Atwood Pratt) Comer, Charles Caldwell Dobie, Madeleine Z. (Madeleine Zabriskie) Doty, H. G. (Harrison Griswold) Dwight, John Galsworthy, Katharine Fullerton Gerould, Zephine Humphrey, Mary Lerner, F. J. Louriet, E. V. (Edward Verrall) Lucas, Margaret Lynn, C. A. Mercer, Margaret Prescott Montague, E. (Edith) Nesbit, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Dallas Lore Sharp, Margaret Pollock Sherwood, Ernest Starr, Amy Wentworth Stone, Arthur Russell Taylor

About the author

Katharine Butler Hathaway was an American writer born in 1890 in Baltimore, Maryland, and raised in Salem, Massachusetts. As a child she developed spinal tuberculosis and spent about ten years lying flat on her back during treatment, an experience that shaped both her life and her writing. She later studied at Radcliffe from 1910 to 1912.

She wrote autobiographical work, children's stories, and poems. In 1921 she bought a house in Castine, Maine, then later lived in New York and Paris. She married Daniel Rugg Hathaway in 1932 and returned to Maine, settling in Blue Hill.

Her best-known book is The Little Locksmith, a memoir published in 1943, a year after her death in 1942. The book draws on her childhood illness, her determination to build an adult life on her own terms, and her years in Castine. It became a bestseller, and later readers helped revive it as a modern classic of memoir.