author
Katharine Butler Hathaway
1890–1942
Best known for a memoir published after her death, she wrote with unusual honesty about illness, independence, and the hard-won pleasures of ordinary life. Her work turns a difficult childhood into something vivid, witty, and deeply human.
1 Audiobook
Atlantic Narratives: Modern Short Stories
by Elizabeth Ashe, 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, Katharine Butler Hathaway, 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. Sources from the Maine State Library and SNAC say she grew up in Salem, Massachusetts, and spent much of her childhood dealing with spinal tuberculosis, a long illness that left her physically disabled.
That experience became the heart of her best-known book, The Little Locksmith, a memoir published in 1943, shortly after her death in 1942. The book is remembered for the way it blends pain, sharp observation, and a determined sense of self.
Archival records at Harvard show that she left behind a wider body of work as well, including stories, poems, journals, and other manuscripts. Taken together, those records suggest a writer whose life was constrained in obvious ways, but whose voice was curious, resilient, and unmistakably her own.