Louise Hall Tharp

Background

Louise Hall Tharp was born on June 18, 1898, in Oneonta, New York, United States.

Education

From 1917 to 1919, Tharp attended the present-day School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in Boston, Massachusetts.

Career

Tharp began her career as a member of the National Brownie Committee, Girl Scouts of America, in 1925-1934, and as a member of the Girl Scout Council, Rochester, New York, in 1927-1928. She was the editor of Trailmaker, a magazine for Girl Scout leaders, from 1925 to 1926. Her first book, Tory Hole, the first of eight fictionalized accounts of historical personages written mostly during the 1940s for young people, was published in 1940.

In 1950 she began writing for the adult market and penned her best-remembered work, The Peabody Sisters of Salem, which became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, followed by Until Victory (1953), Three Saints and a Sinner (1956), Adventurous Alliance (1959), The Baroness and the General (1962), Mrs. Jack (1965), Saint-Gaudens and the Gilded Era (1969), and her last book, The Appletons of Beacon Hill (1973).

Achievements

• Louise Tharp is best known as a prolific writer and a contributor of articles to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and American Heritage, and of short stories to various magazines, including Target and Child Life.
  
  She received the Delta Kappa Gamma Educators' Award (1950), the American Library Association Award (1953), the National Endowment for the Arts Award (1953), honorary degrees from Rhode Island College, Northeastern University, Wheaton College, and Mount Holyoke College (1967), and the Connecticut Bicentennial Award (1976) for Tory Hole.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Peabody Sisters of Salem

    (Reviews the colorful lives, divergent personalities, and ...)

    1950
  • Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner

    (A biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner of Boston in the ...)

    1965
  • Until Victory: Horace Mann and Mary Peabody 1953
  • The Appletons of Beacon Hill 1973
  • Adventurous Alliance 1959
  • Saint-Gaudens and the Gilded Era 1969

Membership

Tharp was a member of PEN, the Society of American Historians, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Authors Club, the College Club, the Darien Historical Society, and the Tokeneke Club.

Connections

Louise was married to Carey Edwin Tharp. They had two sons, Carey Edwin "Ted" Tharp, Jr. and Marshall.

Late Husband:

Carey Edwin Tharp

(7 May 1897 - 20 October 1986)

Son:

Carey Edwin "Ted" Tharp Jr.

(27 May 1926 - 21 November 2015)

Son:

Marshall Tharp

References

• Contemporary Authors New Revision Series In response to the escalating need for up-to-date information on writers, Contemporary Authors New Revision Series (Volume 198) brings researchers the most recent data on the world's most popular authors.
  2010