[2] Carolyn Judith Kroll[3] was born in Washington, D.C., on May 2, 1949, the daughter of Henry August Kroll and his wife, Mildred Josephine (née Mencke),[4][1] and grew up in nearby Silver Spring, Maryland.

She attended Middlebury College as an undergraduate and Indiana University Bloomington for graduate studies, where she earned a master of arts in 1974 and a Ph.D. in English in 1982.

[3][5] Her dissertation was titled, The reader as character in the High Victorian novel: studies of the reader/writer relationship in Vanity Fair, the Way We Live Now, Middlemarch, and the Egoist.

[3] She is known for navigating the company through the Great Recession and for publishing authors such as Doris Kearns Goodwin, David W. Blight, Stephen King, Jennifer Weiner, and Jason Reynolds.

[4] Carolyn Reidy died of a heart attack in Southampton, New York, on May 12, 2020, aged 71.