Anyone who has lived in the small towns of the Midwest will resonate with her sharp observation of these places. Yet her conclusion is not rejection.
Helen Santmyer (1895–1986) would be mostly forgotten except for that fact that in 1982, in her eighties, a university press published her novel “. . . And Ladies of the Club.” Set in a small city in her home state of Ohio, the novel covers generations of women in a literary club — building through their lives a Tocquevillian picture of the small voluntary associations that once defined American public life. The novel was a surprise success, generating literary bidding-wars, selling two million copies in paperback, and sparking innumerable newspaper profiles of the elderly author. Santmyer wrote poetry as well, beginning in her her undergraduate days, and in December 1921 she published in the literary journal “The Bookman” today’s Poem of the Day, a sonnet called “The Prairie Town.” Anyone who has lived in the small towns of the Midwest will resonate with her sharp observation of the places where the “compass-needle streets lead up and down / And lose themselves in empty prairie seas.” Yet her conclusion is not rejection. The towns rest in “the unsoftened majesty” of the prairie, and “The long main street . . . / Lies like an old sea road, star-pointed north.”
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