Online Companion: The Complete Student, Achieving Success in College and BeyondChapter 2: The Goal ZoneCase in Point: Helen Hooven Santmyer Can you imagine waiting 55 years for your novel to be published? That's what it was like for Helen Hooven Santmyer, who published a novel entitled The Fierce Dispute in 1928 and then waited until 1982 for the publication of her second novel. Santmyer was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1895 and, as a young girl, fell in love with literature when she read Louisa May Alcott's Little Women. After graduating from college in 1918, she went to New York City, where she was a suffragist and held an office job at Scribner's magazine, a leading literary periodical of its day. Family responsibilities soon called her back to Ohio however and, from then on, Santmyer held positions as the head of the English Department at Cedarville College and as a librarian in Dayton. Ill health forced her to retire at the age of 64, whereupon she resumed her writing career. She published a collection of essays in 1963 and then commenced the project she had been waiting all her life to undertake: an epic novel entitled …And Ladies of the Club, about four generations of ordinary life in a rural Ohio town. She began her book in 1964 at the age of 69 and finished it roughly 10 years later. Its 1,300 manuscript pages were shipped in 11 boxes to Ohio State University Press, who published it in 1982. A year later, publishing
giant G.P. Putnam's Sons purchased the rights to the book and brought
it to the attention of the general public. Then in her late eighties and
living in a nursing home, Santmyer saw her novel rise to the top of the
New York Times best-seller list, where it held the #1 position
for 7 weeks (37 weeks on the list altogether). The Book-of-the-Month Club
chose it for its main selection and it went on to sell 162,000 hardcover
copies and over a million in paperback. |
