Olive Higgins Prouty

Who was Olive Higgins Prouty?

Olive Higgins Prouty was an American novelist and poet, best known for her pioneering consideration of psychotherapy in Now, Voyager and her novel Stella Dallas adapted into a stage play in 1924 and movies in 1925, 1937. The novel was used as the basis for the successful film — Stella Dallas, a melodrama that starred Barbara Stanwyck and was nominated for two Academy Awards — and a radio serial which was broadcast daily for 18 years, despite Prouty's legal efforts. Olive Higgins, who was born and raised in Worcester, Massachusetts, was a 1904 graduate of Smith College and after she married Louis Prouty in 1907, they moved to Brookline, Massachusetts in 1908.

In 1894 Prouty was reported to have suffered from a nervous breakdown that lasted nearly two years according to the Clark University Archives and Special Collections.

After the death of her daughter Olivia in 1923 Prouty suffered from another nervous breakdown in 1925. Her poetry collection was published posthumously by Friends of the Goddard Library, Clark University, Worcester, MA as Between the Barnacles and Bayberries: and Other Poems after it was released for publication in 1997 by her children Richard and Jane.