Helen Hooven Santmyer was an American novelist, teacher, and librarian whose long and largely private writing life ended in a late and unexpected public triumph. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, on November 25, 1895, she was the oldest child of Joseph Wright Santmyer and Bertha Hooven Santmyer. Her father had studied medicine before turning to business. Around 1900 the family moved to the Hooven house in Xenia, in Greene County, where Joseph took a position with the R. A. Kelly Company, a rope manufacturer. Santmyer grew up in that Civil War-era house, later describing a childhood that was active and happy, and she began writing early. Her mother set aside a small space that served as an office, and the habit of composing in private, without expectation of an audience, stayed with her for decades.
She graduated from Xenia High School in 1913. An attack of typhoid fever delayed her college entrance, but she recovered and entered Wellesley College, graduating in 1918 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and composition. From 1919 to 1921 she worked in New York as secretary to the editor of Scribner’s Magazine at Charles Scribner’s Sons, a job that put her close to the literary marketplace of the period. She then returned briefly to Xenia to help care for her mother, taught English for a year at the local high school, and served for a time as an assistant in the English department at Wellesley. In the mid-1920s she went to Oxford University, one of the early American women to study there in that way, and received a degree in literature in 1927. While still at Oxford she published her first novel, Herbs and Apples, in 1925. The book is partly autobiographical. In the character Derrick Thornton she offered a portrait of a driven young woman determined to become a novelist, an ambition Santmyer herself never abandoned even when ordinary employment filled most of her days.
After Oxford she returned to Xenia and wrote a second novel, The Fierce Dispute, published by Houghton Mifflin in 1929. Neither early book sold widely. In the summer of 1930 she was a colonist at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, where she worked on another novel, Farewell, Summer, which would not appear until after her death, and where she met the actor and playwright Daniel Reed and the novelist Thornton Wilder. She joined the Xenia Woman’s Club in 1928, an affiliation that later mattered more than she could have known, because the women’s literary club became the organizing device of her major work.
The Depression years were difficult. The family spent time on the West Coast in search of work, and during that period Santmyer began essays about her hometown and early drafts related to the long novel that would occupy her for much of the rest of her life. After the family returned to Ohio she accepted, in the mid-1930s, a position as dean of women and head of the English department at Cedarville College, a Presbyterian school a short distance from Xenia. When the college changed hands and direction she left. With help from her close friend and longtime companion Mildred Sandoe, she found work as a reference librarian at the Dayton and Montgomery County Public Library, remaining there until her retirement around 1960. She never married. Survivors at the end of her life included a brother, Philip, and a sister, Jane Anderson.
Retirement did not mean ease. Santmyer’s health had been uneven for years. Beyond the typhoid of her youth she suffered undulant fever that left lasting digestive trouble, emphysema connected with a lifetime of smoking, arthritis, a serious fall in her sixties that injured her spinal cord, and, late in life, blindness in one eye. Even so, she returned to the essays begun in California. Ohio State University Press published them in 1962 as Ohio Town, a portrait of Xenia. The book won the Florence Roberts Head Memorial Award from the Ohioana Library Association in 1964. Only after that recognition, when she was already in her late sixties, did she give her full attention to the enormous novel she had been turning over for decades.
That novel was “…And Ladies of the Club.” Santmyer conceived it, at least in part, as an answer to Sinclair Lewis. She believed Main Street and related books had treated Midwestern small-town life as narrow and mean, and she wanted to show the ordinary civic, domestic, and intellectual work of women in such a place as something constructive rather than merely provincial. The story follows members of a women’s literary club in the fictional town of Waynesboro, Ohio, from 1868 to 1932, using the club’s meetings and the lives of its members across four generations to register political, cultural, and social change. She wrote much of the manuscript by hand in ledger books. When she submitted it to Ohio State University Press in 1976 it arrived in eleven boxes. The original draft is variously reported at well over 1,300 pages and, in some accounts, near 1,900 before cutting. Weldon Kefauver, the press director, accepted it on the condition of heavy abridgment. By then Santmyer was living for long periods at Hospitality Home East, a nursing home in Xenia, and much of the revision was done there.
The press published the book in 1982, when Santmyer was eighty-six or eighty-seven. It was only the second novel the press had issued. There was little advertising money, and only a few hundred copies sold, mostly to Ohio libraries. A chain of recommendations then carried the book to G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Putnam reissued it in 1984. The Book-of-the-Month Club made it a main selection and sold more than 162,000 copies. The novel reached number one on the New York Times best-seller list and remained on the list for many months, thirty-seven consecutive weeks in one widely cited account, with seven weeks at the top. Paperback sales later passed a million copies, and some later summaries put total copies in print well above two million. Santmyer, nearly blind, frail, and living in the nursing home, became a celebrity at eighty-eight. She received the Ohioana Book Award for fiction in 1983, an honorary doctorate from Wright State University in 1984, recognition in women’s halls of fame in Greene County and the state, and the Ohio Governor’s Award in 1985.
The success was real, but it arrived too late to change the shape of her working life. She died of emphysema on February 21, 1986, at Hospitality Home East in Xenia, at the age of ninety, and was buried in Woodland Cemetery there. Farewell, Summer appeared posthumously in 1988, and her earlier novels were reissued in the wake of the bestseller. An Ohio historical marker later noted her contribution outside the Hooven family home.
Santmyer’s reputation rests almost entirely on one book, and critical opinion of that book has always been mixed. Admirers praise its patience, its density of social detail, and its insistence that the unspectacular lives of clubwomen, teachers, wives, and town professionals are worth a chronicle on the scale of an epic. Detractors find the length exhausting and the tone too affectionate toward the very provincial world Lewis had attacked. Both responses are fair to different parts of the text. What is harder to dispute is the oddity of the career itself. Santmyer published two novels in her thirties, then spent the middle of her life teaching and working in a library, then produced a town portrait in her sixties and a 1,300-page novel in her eighties. She did not fit the model of the young writer who breaks through and is afterward managed by a market. She fit, instead, an older pattern in which writing is a private obligation carried on beside paid work, revised in nursing-home rooms, and only accidentally discovered.
That accidental discovery is why she is remembered. “…And Ladies of the Club” is not a forgotten modernist experiment or a regional curiosity rescued by scholars. It is a commercial phenomenon that began as a university-press novel almost no one outside Ohio had heard of. Its afterlife says something about American reading habits in the mid-1980s, when a very long, old-fashioned novel about women’s clubs in a small Ohio town could still command a mass audience. It also says something about persistence. Santmyer did not write the book in a burst of late inspiration. She had been thinking about the material, in one form or another, for much of her adult life, and she finished it under conditions of poor eyesight, limited mobility, and institutional living. The public reward lasted only a short time before her death. The book, and the record of how it was made, outlasted her.
CONCLUSION
A writer whose body challenges did not stop her from finishing her book finally published it.