Best Selling Books by Helen Hooven Santmyer

“I wanted to tell the truth about the small town.” Xenia, Ohio: The young among us sometimes rebel in their inexperience, saying “nothing ever happens here.” They say it because they do not know the old houses. If they live long enough they will learn that everything has happened here, and may happen again. The town is Winesburg and Spoon River, it is Highbury and Cranford, it is even Illyria and Elsinore. Little that mankind knows and endures but has been here known and endured: even battles and sieges—Shiloh and Vicksburg, Chickamauga and Chattanooga, and all the others, before and since—have been fought here, in the minds of women who waited and the memories of soldiers who came home again. For all of her 90 years Helen Hooven Santmyer—critically acclaimed author of “...And Ladies of the Club”—has been carrying on a love affair with her hometown of Xenia. Her OHIO TOWN is a microcosm of a century of America. The history, heartache, and hilarity of small-town life...The sights and sounds, like the locomotive whistle, imprinted in our memories...The unsung heroes of Americana: Miss Harper, the rigorous, unforgettable sixth grade teacher; Dr. Will, the unfailingly patient family practitioner; Miss McElwain, the librarian for 50 years. All are celebrated in this award-winning, heart-warming memoir of an America that will live forever in our hearts. First published in 1956, Ohio Town received widespread critical recognition as a stirring, magical blend of history and memoir. “Miss Santmyer writes beautifully”—WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD “A new gem in the crown of Ohio’s classics. The theme is the beauty of Midwest America, the closeness of a small town to the countryside and, therefore, to the world, to poetry, and to the enlightened mind.”—TOLEDO BLADE “A lively history pulsating with memories.”—HISTORY NEWS

It''s a long, languorous, country summer in a small Ohio town. After many years spent away as a scholar and writer, Elizabeth Lane has returned to the setting of her most poignant childhood memories, a town steeped in her family''s long history. She comes to Sunbury to work on a book but finds she is haunted by one memory in particular. It was 1905, she was eleven and in love with her cousin, Steve, painfully watching his ill-fated romance with the beautiful Damaris. Looking back, Elizabeth discovers a world of feelings that she knows belong more to adulthood than to childhood, and as she sees the tragic, doomed love of Steve and Damaris, she wishes she could be a child forever. Peopled with superbly realized characters, steeped in the golden glow of an era fondly recalled, and marked by the prodigious talent displayed in ". . . And Ladies of the Club", Farewell, Summer is the moving tale of star-crossed love -- innocent and elusive -- and of a young girl''s coming of age.

Small-town America, ghosts, domesticity, and New World-Old World tensions - these combine in Helen Hooven Santmyer''s second novel, The Fierce Dispute (1929), which feature a fiercely disputatious southern Ohio matriarch and her adult daughter locked in battle for the very soul of a child, Lucy Anne, from whose viewpoint much of the narrative unfolds. The Fierce Dispute pits Margaret Baird, the proud bearer of the Linley-Hewitt-Baird family history, against Margaret''s cosmopolitan and romantic daughter, Hilary. Set in the Xenia, Ohio, family home, the novel''s real battleground is Lucy Anne herself, the child mired in conflict because she loves both her mother Hilary and grandmother Margaret.

Herbs and Apples, the novel Helen Hooven Santmyer wrote at the height of her youthful creative powers, is the work that many critics have loved even more than . . . And Ladies of the Club. Laced with nostalgia as well as timeless insight into human character, Santmyer''s enchanting novel is as contemporary today as the day it was written.