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Olive Prouty Higgins Edit Profile

philanthropist writer

Olive Higgins Prouty was an American writer and philanthropist.

Background

She was born in 1882 in Worcester, Massachussets, United States, the daughter of Milton Prince, a manufacturer with the Norton Emory Reel Company, and Katherine Chapin. She and her two brothers and sister became part of a well-established New England family, secure in its academic, business, and social traditions.

Education

Graduating from Worcester Classical High School in 1900, she went on to earn a bachelor of literature degree from Smith College in 1904. After her marriage she enrolled in Radcliffe for graduate study.

Career

She wrote her thirteen books (twelve of them novels), suffered at least one "nervous breakdown, " and kept a beneficent eye on her alma mater.

After her husband death, Prouty continued to concentrate on her writing. She had already achieved a large measure of financial, if not critical, success as early as 1922 when Stella Dallas became a best-seller. Another Prouty novel, Now Voyager (1941), became a screen hit, starring Bette Davis, in 1942. Prouty endowed a generous scholarship fund in 1947. Since that time, between four and nine students a year, selected by the school because of their writing talent, have been awarded aid from the Olive Higgins Prouty Fund.

Today Prouty lingers in literary memory primarily as the woman who played fairy godmother to Sylvia Plath. Prouty became an important figure in Plath's life; she was of very real financial and emotional comfort after Plath's early suicide attempt and subsequent hospitalization. As a result, Prouty is a prominent figure not only in Plath's correspondence, but in her biographers' and critics' publications as well.

By 1961, her popularity dimmed, Prouty was unable to interest a mainline publisher in her memoirs (Pencil Shavings) and had to have them printed privately by the Riverside Printing Company in Cambridge, Massachussets. She died at ninety-two in Brookline. (or thereabouts; she had effectively obscured her birthdate).

Achievements

  • Olive Higgins Prouty is best known for her novel Stella Dallas and her pioneering consideration of psychotherapy in her novel Now, Voyager. She is also known for her philanthropic works, and for her resulting association with the writer Sylvia Plath, whom she encountered as a result of endowing a Smith College scholarship for "promising young writers". She enabled many bright young women to receive one of the best educations available in this country.

Connections

She married Lewis I. Prouty, a manufacturer, on January 7, 1907. She raised four children, three girls and a boy; two of the daughters died in infancy. Her husband died in 1951.

Father:
Milton Prince

Mother:
Katherine Chapin

Spouse:
Lewis I. Prouty