Ohio Town is a 1962 autobiographical memoir by Helen Hooven Santmyer, describing the places, communities, and some notable people in the Xenia she remembers from her childhood. It is written in mixed first and second person, and the town name itself is never mentioned, except in the "Acknowledgements" small print where Santmyer names helpful sources, including "our paper, the Xenia Daily Gazette".
Helen Hooven Santmyer was an American writer, educator, and librarian. She is primarily known for her best-selling epic "...And Ladies of the Club", published when she was in her 80s.
Xenia is a city in and the county seat of Greene County, Ohio, United States. The municipality is located in southwestern Ohio 15 miles (24 km) from Dayton and is part of the Dayton Metropolitan Statistical Area, as well as the Miami Valley region. The name comes from the Greek word Xenia (ξενία), which means "hospitality".
The Xenia Daily Gazette is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American daily newspaper published daily except Sunday in Xenia, Ohio. It is owned by Ohio Community Media, a subsidiary of Versa Capital Management.
The book received a limited but favorable reception upon initial publication, and won the 1964 Florence Roberts Head Award.[1] Afterwards it was mostly ignored. After Santmyer became a famous author in 1984, Ohio Town was republished, in hardcover (Harper & Row, 1984) and paperback (Berkley, 1985).
Weldon Kefauver, the managing editor (later director) at OSU Press, described that the very first page of the manuscript of Ohio Town "all but persuaded" him that her writing had "that universality" that explains "the enduring appeal of the world's greatest authors", by turning the ordinary and the mundane into the metaphoric and poetic.[2]
Reception
It is a lively history, pulsating with memories, local lore, and landmarks "as familiar as bread and butter."
Dowie, James Iverne (November 1964). "The Association Bookshelf". History News. 19 (13): 217–18. JSTOR42645692.
Hill, Eldon C. (September 1963). "Ohio Town". Indiana Magazine of History. 59 (3): 294–95.
JSTOR is a digital library founded in 1995. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now also includes books and other primary sources, and current issues of journals. It provides full-text searches of almost 2,000 journals. As of 2013, more than 8,000 institutions in more than 160 countries had access to JSTOR; most access is by subscription, but some of the site's public domain and open access content is available at no cost to anyone. JSTOR's revenue was $86 million in 2015.
Later book reviews
Phelps, Teresa Godwin (September 9, 1984). "Riding on shirttails of 'Ladies': Second look at Santmyer's 'Ohio'". Chicago Tribune: L43.
Myers, Sally A. (Summer–Autumn 1998). "Review of Loris Troyer's Portage Pathways and Santmyer's Ohio Town". Northwest Ohio Quarterly: 167–70.
On Santmyer
Kefauver, Weldon A. (1987). "Foreword". In Santmyer, Helen Hooven. The Fierce Dispute (2nd ed.). St. Martin's.
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