author
Maude Livingston Hall Gray
1877–1952
Best known today for a gently comic Thanksgiving sketch, this American writer came from a prominent New York family and moved in the wider Roosevelt circle. Her surviving work has an easy, stage-ready charm that captures small-town talk, holiday bustle, and affectionate satire.
1 Audiobook
The Scrubtown sewing circle's Thanksgiving : An old ladies' sociable
by Maude Livingston Hall Gray
About the author
Born in 1877, Maude Livingston Hall Gray was an American writer whose published work now seems to survive mainly through The Scrubtown Sewing Circle's Thanksgiving, a short comic play preserved by Project Gutenberg. The piece is a light holiday performance set in a New Hampshire parlor, built around gossip, charity, and community life rather than grand drama.
She was born Maude Livingston Hall, later married Lawrence Waterbury, and then David Gray. Sources about her family identify her as a daughter of Valentine Gill Hall Jr. and Mary Livingston Ludlow Hall, and also note that she was an aunt of Eleanor Roosevelt.
Archival records show that papers relating to Maude Livingston Hall Gray and her husband David Gray were preserved at Yale, suggesting a life connected to a well-documented social and political world even if her literary footprint was small. She died in 1952, and today her name is remembered chiefly through that surviving Thanksgiving play and the historical records around her family.