Olive Higgins Prouty

Born in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1882, Olive Higgins Prouty studied at Smith College and went on to become a successful American novelist and poet. She wrote about family relationships, class expectations, marriage, and the emotional lives of women in a way that connected strongly with readers.

Her best-known novel, Stella Dallas (1923), became especially influential through its film adaptations and remains the work most closely linked to her name. Other novels, including Now, Voyager, also found wide audiences and were adapted for the screen, showing how effectively her stories moved between popular fiction and Hollywood.

Prouty is also remembered for her personal encouragement of Sylvia Plath, whom she supported with a scholarship during Plath's time at Smith. She died in 1974, leaving behind fiction that captured both the comforts and the strains of twentieth-century domestic life.