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Acclaimed author and illustrator of juvenile literature Lois Lenski was born in Springfield in 1893, grew up in Anna, and graduated from Sidney High School. In 1915, Lenski graduated from The Ohio State University and moved to New York City to work and study art. After illustrating several children’s books in the early 1920s, she began writing and illustrating her own stories. Lenski specialized in historical fiction and regional themes–eventually publishing nearly one hundred carefully-researched books.
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The author of fifteen novels, ten plays, and more than 100 stories, Dawn Powell was born in 1896 in Mount Gilead at 53 West North Street and grew up in Shelby. She graduated from Lake Erie College in Painesville and moved to New York in 1918. Although some of her early works, such as She Walks in Beauty (1928) and The Bride’s House (1929), draw from her life in small-town Ohio, she is best known for her satiric portrayals of life in New York, including A Time to Be Born (1942) and The Wicked Pavilion (1954). Often compared to Dorothy Parker and associated with contemporaries John Dos Passos, Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, and Gore Vidal, Powell received the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award for lifelong achievement in literature in 1964. She died in New York in 1965.
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In 1938 the president of Kenyon College, Gordon Keith Chalmers, brought one of the nation’s most distinguished poets and critics, John Crowe Ransom, to the Gambier Hill. Chalmers brought Ransom to Kenyon College to create a distinguished literary review. With its first appearance late in 1938, The Kenyon Review would become one of the most influential and honored literary magazines in America. Among the authors Ransom published during his two decades as editor were Robert Penn Warren, William Empson, Flannery O’Connor, Doris Lessing, Robert Lowell, and Randall Jarrell. The Kenyon Review also became closely identified with the “New Criticism,” a method of interpreting literature that influenced succeeding generations of readers and teachers around the world. (Continued other side.)
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Author, editor, and social critic William Dean Howells (1837-1920) was born in Martins Ferry, the son of an itinerant printer and publisher. Self-educated, Howells learned the printer’s craft early and took up journalism, rising to city editor of the Ohio State Journal (Columbus) in 1858. From 1871 to 1881, he was editor of the Atlantic Monthly magazine, a position of enormous influence in American literary tastes. Howells championed the work of Emily Dickenson, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Stephen Crane, as well as several others. A prolific writer himself, he published over one hundred works. Howells is best known for his realistic fiction, including A Modern Instance (1882) and The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885). Many of his novels reflect his Ohio roots.
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Henry Solomon Lehr founded Ohio Northern University in 1871 as the Northwestern Ohio Normal School. Its purpose was to train teachers and to provide higher education to the people in Northwest Ohio. In 1885, the school became Ohio Normal University. The new name recognized that the institution drew students from all over Ohio and the nation, and offered courses in many disciplines, including literature, music, business, telegraphy, and law, as well as teacher training. Beginning with 131 students, the institution’s enrollment grew rapidly during its first thirty years of existence. Buildings on the early campus included Dukes Memorial (left), built in 1905; the Normal School Building, built in 1871 and demolished in 1915 to make way for Lehr Memorial (center); and Hill building (right) finished in 1879. The Methodist Episcopal Church (predecessor to the United Methodist Church) assumed control in 1899. Ohio Normal University became Ohio Northern University in 1903. On June 3, 1910, President William Howard Taft delivered that year’s commencement address near this spot.
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William Holmes McGuffey (1800-1873) was a Miami University faculty member in 1836 when he compiled the first edition of the McGuffey Eclectic Reader in this house. His Reader taught lessons in reading, spelling, and civic education by using memorable stories of honesty, hard work, thrift, personal respect, and moral and ethical standards alongside illustrative selections from literary works. The six-edition series increased in difficulty and was developed with the help of his brother Alexander Hamilton McGuffey. After the Civil War the Readers were the basic schoolbooks in thirty-seven states and by 1920 sold an estimated 122 million copies, reshaping American public school curriculum and becoming one of the nation’s most influential publications. (Continued on other side)
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Marion civic leaders Shauck Elah Barlow and Ida Harsh Barlow built “Waldheim,” their Colonial Revival residence, between 1903-1905. Ida Barlow, then president of the Marion Women’s Club, hosted a December 1905 meeting in her new home. Members discussed art, music, literature, and ideas for “civic improvement.” In 1909, this and other Marion clubs reorganized as the Marion County Federation of Women’s Clubs. Federation members soon organized into action: providing college loans to young women; sponsoring visiting city and later school nurses; purchasing trash receptacles; providing dental clinics for low-income residents; and funding railroad crossing safety equipment. Upon her death in 1945, Barlow bequeathed her house to the Federation as the “Women’s Club Home.” The new Federation headquarters offered meeting space for the Executive Board and the many associated clubs. (Continued on other side)
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Helen Hooven Santmyer moved to Xenia at the age of five and graduated from Wellesley College in 1918. She attended Oxford University in England as one of the earliest female Rhodes Scholars. Returning to America with her first book published and a graduate degree in literature, she felt confident that she would gain literary fame. In 1935, Santmyer returned to Xenia, where she became Dean of Women and the head of the English Department at Cedarville College. Finally reaching ultimate success, her novel, And Ladies of the Club with its 1,344 pages became the best selling novel of 1984 and earned her critical acclaim and national recognition at the age of eighty-eight. She was inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996.