Helen Hooven Santmyer: Bestseller at Eighty-Eight
Near Dayton, Ohio
You are passing through Xenia, Ohio, where a quietly extraordinary literary life unfolded. Helen Hooven Santmyer moved here as a small child, and this small Greene County city shaped everything she wrote. She graduated from Wellesley College and later studied at Oxford, earning a B.
Litt. degree. She spent decades crafting a sprawling novel about the social life of a fictional Ohio town from the Civil War era through the twentieth century.
The book, And Ladies of the Club, was first published in nineteen eighty-two by Ohio State University Press, and after Putnam reissued it in nineteen eighty-four it became a runaway national bestseller. Santmyer was eighty-eight years old when it topped the charts, one of the oldest authors in American publishing history to reach the bestseller lists. She had spent decades writing the book.
