It’s the birthday of Helen Hooven Santmyer (1895-1986), who was 88 years old when her novel …And Ladies of the Club hit No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list. The novel had been published quietly two years prior to that by Ohio State University Press. Then a woman overheard a librarian say it was the best novel she’d ever read, and the woman made her son, a writer-producer in L.A., read it, and from there it was bandied about among bigwigs before landing on the desk of a big-time agent, who sold it to G.P. Putnam’s Sons, who published it again, and voilà: success.

Santmyer was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and raised near Dayton in Xenia, Ohio. (The name’s a little highfalutin’ for a small town in Ohio, but whatever.) As a child, Santmyer had undulant fever, which weakened her for life; she also decided as a child never to marry because marriage might interfere with her desire to be a writer. Santmyer studied at Wellesley College and taught there for a couple of years before working in New York as a secretary to the editor of Scribner’s. She then returned to Xenia and to teaching and also wrote her first novel, Herbs and Apples (1925), which drew on her life in Xenia.

Santmyer spent three years at Oxford and received a degree in literature in 1927 and then returned to Xenia yet again and wrote her second novel, The Fierce Dispute (1929). She went to the artists’ colony MacDowell and wrote her third novel, Farewell, Summer, which would not be published until two years after her death (1988). Santmyer moved with her parents to Orange County, California, for several years and continued writing, but they eventually returned to—wait for it—Xenia. In 1935, Santmyer became dean of women and English department head at Cedarville College, just eight miles from Xenia, leaving in 1953 when scary fundamentalists took over the college. She then worked at a library.

It wasn’t until she fully retired in 1959 that Santmyer could return to full-time writing due to her poor health. In 1962 she published Ohio Town; …And Ladies of the Club was accepted for publication in 1976 but had to undergo extensive renovations, as it were, and didn’t get published until 1982. It sold only a few hundred copies until re-publication two years later.

Have a fine and dandy Monday because you just never know and stay scrupulously honest to the data.