Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Carol Goes on the Stage by Helen Dore Boylston Search AbeBooks. We're sorry; the page you requested could not be found. AbeBooks offers millions of new, used, rare and out-of-print books, as well as cheap textbooks from thousands of booksellers around the world. Shopping on AbeBooks is easy, safe and 100% secure - search for your book, purchase a copy via our secure checkout and the bookseller ships it straight to you. Search thousands of booksellers selling millions of new & used books. New & Used Books. New and used copies of new releases, best sellers and award winners. Save money with our huge selection. Rare & Out of Print Books. From scarce first editions to sought-after signatures, find an array of rare, valuable and highly collectible books. Textbooks. Catch a break with big discounts and fantastic deals on new and used textbooks. Carol Goes On the Stage. New softcover. Fresh and eager from the success which she scored in her small parts at the Winasset summer theater, Carol Page comes down to Broadway determined to find a part. She is ready to take anything, even the lowliest walk-on, for her dander is up: her father has taunted her with the remark that she will "go bust in two months." She has saved nearly $400 from her summer salary and she means to stretch this until a producer has given her the nod. With her friend Julia, who is looking for a part in comedy, Carol finds a room in a theatrical boardinghouse. She also finds Herbert, a pet skunk, and his vaudeville trainer on the floor above. But week in, week out, she encounters nothing but discouragement in the casting offices. "Sorry, but you are not the type - perhaps we can let you know later." Those turn-downs drive her frantic. When her money has dwindled to the point of desperation, Carol is lucky to find herself a job as an usher in the balcony. Then she picks up a little work on a radio program, she gets a walk-on part in a play which soon flops, and at long last she comes to her real trial on Broadway. The story of Carol's and Julia's adventures on Broadway and the story of what the theater grudgingly gives to them has the true ring, the warmth and the color, which the reader expects of a Helen Dore Boylston story. This book is perfect for every girl who ever dreamed of "going on the stage." Carol Goes on the Stage by Helen Dore Boylston. "Carol Page beamed upon them from the threshold--slender and dark-haired, her eyes startlingly green in a heart-shaped face. She was so lightly and perfectly balanced that she seemed poised for flight in any direction, and her head, with the thick hair falling to her shoulders, tilted back with sudden, dramatic intensity. 'I was helping an old lady across the street,' she said. 'I was teaching boy scouts to build a fire in the rain. My plane crashed in a snowstorm. I've been all tied up.'" How can you beat a character introduction like that? Helen Dore Boylston was also the author of the Sue Barton nurse stories, but I have a soft spot in my heart for the Carol books--and not just because of the name. My copy is a first edition, published in 1941 and withdrawn from a public library in Chisholm, Minn probably due to the coffee spills, pencil marks and torn, yellowed pages. Considering I got it in the 1970s, it's holding up quite well. According to the blurb on the back of one of Boylston's book, Carol is one of "Two Famous Young Heroines from the books of Helen Dore Boylston." Here's the description: "Carol Page, who wants to be an actress. Attractive, full of spirits, but serious underneath, Carol treads the difficult path toward a career on the stage, finding all the hardships--and thrills, too--that the theater has always provided for the girl who wants to reach the pinnacle." She wrote four books in the Carol series, starting with Carol Goes Backstage , and moving on to Carol Plays Summer Stock , Carol on Broadway , and finally, Carol on Tour . As the book opens, Carol is late for the dress rehearsal for the high school play. After making the appearance noted above, she goes outside to rehearse her lines and is "interrupted by the jerky arrival of a battered roadster driven by a tall boy with a thin, eager face and tousled fair hair ." This would be Ned Long, and don't get attached--the Boylston books are about careers first, then love. She goes off in his car with him, which naturally breaks down. She hitches a ride to the school with someone in a "long, underslung coupe", who talks to her about acting. She has a great success in the play and heads off for a trip to New York with her older brother. As she gets tickets for Candida , she walks through Times Square lost in daydreams of theatrical success: They put on their own scenes (directed by that annoying Mike), and get to watch a production from backstage, including a magical production of Peter Pan . Everything is going well, until Aunt Salome stops by to check on Carol, and runs into Mike, who confirms all of the family's worst suspicions about the kind of riffraff Carol is associating with at the theater. Her parents demand she return home, but first she needs to finish her commitment to the theater by appearing in one more student production: Dear Brutus . In the audience for this play, however, is the manager of a theater who has an acting job to offer for one outstanding actor. Guess who gets the job? Carol! But Julia and Mike and a few others get apprenticeships, so they'll all be together again in summer stock. The charm of this book lies in the detailed and fascinating depiction of life in the theater--from high school productions, to off-Broadway productions, to the Broadway show in which one of the apprentices gets a walk-on part. It's also very evocative of life as it must have been for the young apprentices in the New York theater scene. Boylston's novels are fast-moving, and her characters and dialogue are vivid and dramatic. Carol learns a lot about herself and acting, and as she gets to know Mike, she gains respect for his talent despite his gruff exterior. But the central focus in this novel is always Carol and her journey on her way to becoming a real actress, despite her family's objections and the hard road ahead. Helen Dore Boylston. In addition to her Sue Barton and Carol Page series, Helen Dore Boylston also wrote numerous short stories and essays as well as Landmark Book, Clara Barton: Founder of the American Red Cross. About the Author. Helen Dore Boylston was born in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on April 4, 1895. She left her happy childhood home to attend first Simmons College in Boston, then Massachusetts General Hospital School of Nursing. After graduating in 1915, she enlisted in the Harvard Medical Unit and served as an anesthesiologist with the British Expeditionary Force in France during World War I. During her service, Ms. Boylston achieved the rank of captain. For the two following years, she did relief work for the Red Cross in Italy, Germany, Poland, Russia, and the Balkans. During this time she met Rose Wilder Lane, daughter of Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the two women became close friends. Ms. Boylston continued her nursing back at Massachusetts General Hospital serving as an instructor of anesthesiology as well as a department director; in New York City she worked as a psychiatric nurse; in a Connecticut hospital she served as a head nurse. In the late 1920s, Ms. Boylston turned her focus to writing. Ms. Boylston's first book, Sister: The War Diary of a Nurse (1927), detailed her wartime experiences. In 1982, long after writing the Sue Barton and Carol Page series, Ms. Boylston and Ms. Lane published Travels With Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford, the diary of the two friends' 1926 European excursion in an automobile they named Zenobia. Recently we learned of a quote from Ms. Boylston that thrilled our collective hearts. Here it is as included in the Knight Books reprints of Sue Barton, Senior Nurse, "Every single incident in the first two 'Sue's' - nursing incident, I mean - actually happened, either to me or to some of my classmates. Kit and Connie were real, and those are their real names. Same goes for Bill. Francessca and Hilda were also taken from life, though those are not their real names. Hilda, in fact, was my room-mate when I was in probe. Miss Cameron was so real she scares me yet, though I loved her dearly. She was greatly amused to find herself in a book and wrote me a charming letter about it. Sue is not me! I made her up, lock, stock and barrel. She is the kind of person and the kind of nurse I wished I were, and I had a lot of fun creating her." Well how about that! BOYLSTON, Helen Dore. An only child, Helen Dore Boylston attended Portsmouth public schools and trained as a nurse at Massachusetts General Hospital. Two days after graduating, she joined the Harvard medical unit that had been formed to serve with the British Army. After the war, she missed the comradeship, intense effort, and mutual dependence of people upon one another when under pressure, and joined the Red Cross to work in Poland and Albania. This work, often in isolation and with little apparent effect, wasn't satisfying. Returning to the U.S., Boylston taught nose and throat anaesthesia at Massachusetts General for two years. During this time Rose Wilder Lane read Boylston's wartime diary and arranged for it to be published in the Atlantic Monthly . In the diary, Boylston wonders if the narrower, traditionally feminine world would have contented her if there had been no war: "I might even have married, as the final Great Adventure—which now seems to me a terrifying and impossible thing to do." Coming into a small inheritance, she spent several years living in Europe. When her money was lost in the Depression, she returned again to nursing but, in the meantime, began trying to earn a living by writing. The short stories Boylston sold to the Atlantic and elsewhere are small narrative moments, with carefully controlled viewpoints and a detailed perception of the surface of reality. "Dawn" is about a girl's first kiss; several others are told through the eyes of a dog, cat, or horse. Failing to discover any important adult subject matter, Boylston began to reproduce, for girls, the milieu she knew best. Sue Barton, Student Nurse , published in 1936, was the first of a series of seven in which Boylston intended to supply accurate information about a much-romanticized profession. Four "Carol" books in the early 1940s did the same for the stage; Boylston's friend and neighbor, Eva LeGallienne, supplied her with the necessary background. The Sue Barton books are not written to formula; some are episodic while others answer a single dramatic question. Although the first is undoubtedly the best—longest, most careful in characterization, richest in detail—all are technically well above the level of series fiction. They also reflect the times in which they were written. In the early novels, Sue Barton is an acceptable 1930s career woman, who postpones marriage first to develop her own talents and then for financial reasons. In Visiting Nurse (1938) she does socially conscious work in the slums and in the next book (1939) creates her own job by persuading farm women to fund a rural nurse service. By 1949, however, she is the mother of three children under six, and wondering whether her training is wasted now in her role as wife and mother. The next book, Neighborhood Nurse (1949), insists that it is not and ends with a new pregnancy as answer to the problems of a restive wife, although in the final book, written in 1952, Boylston arranges for Sue's husband to be stricken with tuberculosis so she can happily return to hospital work. She also makes a point of demonstrating that Sue's children are not harmed by having a working mother. The Sue Barton books remain in print and the earlier ones, at least, are still much read by girls between eight and twelve. Like Boylston's wartime diary, the books are full of cocoa-parties and female comradeship. Sue Barton, though technically an adult, is actually a big girl with whom preadolescents identify; she is jolly, frank, competent, mischievous, and rather timid about facing her superiors. The only thing she does with the man she loves is work with him, as friends, to bandage a burn or track down a typhoid carrier. The books are kept moving by minor crises in which Sue takes a bus downtown and is afraid she will get lost, must stay alone in the dark, is unsure of her ability to take on responsibility, has misunderstandings with her friends, or must deal with authority figures who are sometimes unfair or mistaken. In other words, Sue is confronted with the crises which loom large in the lives of preadolescents, rather than the actual social and emotional difficulties of the late teens and twenties. Sue solves most of her problems without adult—or male—help. Nursing is portrayed as woman's ideal career because it is useful, caritative, and supervised. It is not glamorized, however: the books give brisk and bracing accounts about operations, dirty work, and insanity. Each book emphasizes supportive female friendship; several reach an emotional climax in the heroine's relationship with some admirable older pioneer of nursing or public health. This conception, however, becomes more obviously artificial as the demands of mature womanhood are not met; Sue is neither so convincing nor so interesting as an adult as she is in the early books. Other Works: "Sister": The War Diary of a Nurse (1927). Sue Barton, Senior Nurse (1937). Sue Barton, Rural Nurse (1939). Sue Barton, Superintendent of Nurses (1940). Carol Goes Backstage (1941). Carol Plays Summer Stock (1942). Carol on Broadway (1944). Carol on Tour (1946). Sue Barton, Staff Nurse (1952). Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross (1955). Bibliography: Lane, R.W., Travels with Zenobia: Paris to Albania by Model T Ford: A Journal (1983). Reference Works: CB (1942). The Junior Book of Authors (1951). Twentieth-Century Authors (1978).