Other Fiction Prouty, Olive Higgins: The Fifth Wheel. V1. 30 Oct 2011

[crutledge]

Olive Higgins Prouty (10 January 1882 – 24 March 1974) was an American novelist and poet, best known for her pioneering consideration of psychotherapy in Now, Voyager (1941) (made into a movie Now, Voyager (1942) [1] directed by Irving Rapper and starring Bette Davis and a radio drama [2] starring Ida Lupino produced by Cecil B. de Mille on the Lux Radio Theater,) and her feminist novel (1922) 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 - the 1937 version of Stella Dallas [3] that was 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 (since she had not authorized the sale of the broadcast rights, and was displeased with her characters' portrayals). Olive Higgins, who was born and raised in Worcester, MA was a 1904 graduate of Smith College and after she married Louis Prouty in 1907, they moved to Brookline, MA in 1908.

Excerpt
Lucy looks suspiciously upon the portfolio of theme paper I carry underneath my arm. But in this corner of the world a portfolio of theme paper and a pile of books are as common a part of a girl's paraphernalia as a muff and a shopping-bag on a winter's day on Fifth Avenue. Lucy lives in a university town. The university is devoted principally to the education of men, but there is a girls' college connected with it, so if I am caught scribbling no one except Lucy needs to wonder why.