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Born in Prospect Harbor, Miriam Colwell lived with her grandparents after her mother died when Miriam was a toddler and her father was ill with tuberculosis. She graduated from Winter Harbor High School and then attended the University of Maine, Orono, majoring in English. She left before graduating and moved to New York where she was a freelance and advertising copywriter. She returned to Prospect Harbor in 1940 and became the town's postmaster; her grandfather had held the position but had been forced to leave when he reached the mandatory retirement age. Colwell was 23 and the youngest postmaster in the United States. She still lives in the house built by her great-great-great grandfather in 1817.

Young is the story of one young woman’s restless struggle with life in a small Maine coastal town during the 1950s. Evelyn, a recent high school graduate, confronts the timeless question of what she is going to do with her life. All she knows for sure is that she is eager to escape a place where people know her every move and where her mother bakes bread that Evelyn delivers to the increasing number of summer people. Originally published in 1955, Young follows Evelyn and her best friend, Susan, as they con their way through a rowdy and ultimately tragic twenty-four hours. And, rightly or wrongly, by the end of that day Evelyn chooses her path. The Puckerbrush Review writes, "Everyone who wants to get acquainted with the whole body of Maine literature in the twentieth century should read Miriam Colwell."