Ohio Town

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".

Ohio Town
Cover, first edition
AuthorHelen Hooven Santmyer
Cover artistP. David Horton
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
GenreMemoir
PublisherOhio State University Press
Publication date
1962
Media typePrint (Hardcover)
Pages309 pp

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."

— James Iverne Dowie, History News[3]

[It] is a lively account that entices the reader's attention from the first page to the last.

— Eldon C. Hill, Indiana Magazine of History[4]

Santmyer's [book] transcends specific facts but lets the reader step into history

— Sally A. Myers, Northwest Ohio Quarterly[5]

Notes
  1. "Ohioana Florence Roberts Head Book Award Winners". Ohioana Library. Archived from the original on 2015-03-21. Retrieved 2014-10-03.
  2. Kefauver 1987.
  3. Dowie 1964.
  4. Hill 1963.
  5. Myers 1998.

Further reading

Early book reviews
  • Dowie, James Iverne (November 1964). "The Association Bookshelf". History News. 19 (13): 217–18. JSTOR 42645692.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  • Hill, Eldon C. (September 1963). "Ohio Town". Indiana Magazine of History. 59 (3): 294–95.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

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.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)

On Santmyer
  • Kefauver, Weldon A. (1987). "Foreword". In Santmyer, Helen Hooven (ed.). The Fierce Dispute (2nd ed.). St. Martin's.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
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