[In the following essay, Barry describes the successful saga of “… And Ladies of the Club,” emphasizing the Ohioana Award given to Santmyer in 1983.]

The first item on the New York Times News Quiz for Saturday 14 January was: “Posing for this photograph, the first anyone has been permitted to take of her, was a new experience for 88-year-old Helen Hooven Santmyer, but her other novel experience was even more noteworthy. What was it?”

Readers of Ohioana Quarterly know it concerned her second Ohioana-Award book, “… And Ladies of the Club.” Readers have also seen her photograph, taken with her permission, in several issues of the Quarterly. But Miss Santmyer was “discovered” by the national press when it was announced that her 1,334-page novel about life in small-town Ohio was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club.

G. P. Putnam's Sons first printing is 150,000 copies and paperback rights have been auctioned for ＄396,000. Life magazine (June 1984) has featured Miss Santmyer and the bestseller she published at age 88. The book is also being serialized in Family Circle magazine and adapted for a television miniseries. Several Ohio communities are striving to attract the eye of the TV producers, as a 1974 tornado in Greene County destroyed most of the novel's locale: Xenia, transformed into the fictional town of Waynesboro, from 1868 to 1932.

When the Ohio State University Press in 1982 first published 1,500 copies of “… And Ladies of the Club” at ＄35.00 each, Ohioana Quarterly was one of the few publications to review the book. Don E. Weaver in the spring 1983 issue, under the headline “A Great Ohio Novel,” wrote, “Miss Santmyer is a very facile writer with a simple easy style. She can handle tragedy and scandal, happiness and success without resort to hyperbole or turgid rhetoric. Reading her prose is sheer pleasure.” For this book Miss Santmyer received the 1983 Ohioana Book Award in fiction. (She had previously won a nonfiction award for Ohio Town in 1963.) The novel was nearly fifty years in the writing, interrupted by her writing her reminiscences of Xenia in Ohio Town. (Harper & Row will reprint Ohio Town in paperback and has options on her other previous books.)

A resident for two years of Hospitality Home East in Xenia, Miss Santmyer weighs only 80 lbs. and is confined to a wheelchair. She is nearly blind from cataracts and tires very quickly because of her emphysema. The national publicity, interviews for the “MacNeil-Lehrer Report,” CBS, ABC, NBC, and a crew of German filmmakers have exhausted her.

“I have no plans for the money, but it'll be awfully nice to have it,” she says. After she graduated from Wellesley, where she was encouraged to become a writer, she worked as a secretary to the editor of Scribner's magazine. She earned a second degree from Oxford University but was never able to afford a return trip to Europe. She published two novels (Herbs and Apples, The Fierce Dispute) in the 1920s and returned to Xenia in 1929. “I never got rich from those books,” she says. “An occasional royalty, but they never sold enough to make me rich.”

From 1935 to 1953 she was dean of women and head of the English department at Cedarville College in Ohio. Later she was a reference librarian in Dayton. One of the reasons it took so long to write “… And Ladies of the Club” was that she could only write part time. “That was the trouble, I always had to earn a living while I wrote.”

After a lifetime of obscurity, with great perseverence and undaunted by illness, Helen Hooven Santmyer has gained national fame and much-deserved recognition as a distinguished Ohio author. Her novel, written in longhand in a bookkeeper's ledgers—eleven boxes full—is longer than Gone with the Wind and may well become an equal classic of regional history.

The Ohio State University Press, which still holds the copyright, will use the income it shares with Miss Santmyer to publish books that don't make large profits—scholarly works that require considerable editing and appeal only to a limited market. Or to have the courage to publish a novel weighing 4.2 lbs. that is the same size as Who's Who!