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Olive Higgins Prouty (January 10, 1882–March 24, 1974) was an American novelist, best known for her pioneering consideration of psychotherapy in Now, Voyager and her feminist melodrama Stella Dallas. Prouty was born in Worcester in 1882 to Katherine Chapin and Milton Prince Higgins. Olive Higgins graduated from Smith College in 1904 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Literature. In 1925 Prouty suffered a "nervous breakdown." Her psychiatrist advised her to treat her writing professionally. Two of her later novels, Conflict and Now, Voyager, draw upon her experience of breakdown and recovery. Olive Higgins Prouty died in Brookline on March 24, 1974.

Bibliography

• Bobbie General Manager
• Conflict
• Fabia
• The Fifth Wheel
• Home Port
• Lisa Vale
• Now, Voyager
• Pencil Shavings: Memoirs
• The Star in the Window
• Stella Dallas
• White Fawn

"Lisa Vale," "Home Port" and "Now, Voyager" are all stories about the same fictional family.

Prouty funded Sylvia Plath's scholarship to Smith College, and saw her promise arly on. Prouty paid for the medical expenses associated with Plath's attempted suicide in 1953, only to be caricatured as the fatuous Philomena Guinea in Plath's novel The Bell Jar.

Prouty's reputation as a novelist, already in decline, was further damaged by Plath's malicious wit. To a generation growing up in a less rigid social climate, Prouty's work seemed to be a conservative endorsement of bourgeois conformity, not a serious and ultimately subversive exploration of the possibilities for freedom within it. Nonetheless, Prouty and Plath continued corresponding throughout Plath's life.