In a post on Reading Choices I mention enjoying books on “place”. What I sometimes wish is that there were more writers of the quality of Wendell Berry or Wallace Stegner who wrote about my home state of Ohio. Ohio is an interesting place for more than just its swing state politics. From the absolutely flat drained swampland of northwest Ohio to the Appalachian foothills of eastern Ohio, the state is topographically interesting–even without the dramatic features of mountains or oceans. It is culturally diverse from Little Italy in Cleveland to the Somali community in Columbus to Over the Rhine in Cincinnati. And then there is small town Ohio…
Small town Ohio has been the inspiration for some of writers of place. Helen Hooven Santmyer wrote her massive novel And the Ladies of the Club about four generations in a fictional small town based on her home town of Xenia. I haven’t read it, but it is one of the more striking examples of Ohioana. Another that I have read is Sherwood Anderson whose bleak Winesburg, Ohio chronicles a small town in northwest Ohio based on his boyhood in Clyde, Ohio.
Louis Bromfield was a best selling novelist from the 1920s to the 1940s. He eventually moved back to is hometown of Mansfield, Ohio and established a farm he named Malabar Farm. He wrote some of the first works about sustainable agriculture based on his experiences of trying to renew the worn out soils of this land. His books Pleasant Valley and Malabar Farm and From My Experience: The Pleasures and Miseries of Life on a Farm chronicle his love of the land and agricultural efforts. They precede by twenty years or more many of the ecological and sustainable agriculture books of the seventies, eighties and more recently.
One of my favorite Ohio writers who did write pieces about his (and my current) hometown was James Thurber. I first became acquainted with Thurber when William Windom visited our campus doing stage “readings” of Thurber in the years after his comedy series based on Thurber, My World and Welcome to It. His humorous essays which appeared in The New Yorker included humorous sketches of growing up in Columbus including “The Night the Bed Fell.”
A number of other highly recognized authors were raised or lived for some time in our state. A list appears on WOSU’s Ohioana Authors site, which features audio clips about each of the listed authors, some of which I have linked to above. They include Arthur Schlesinger,Toni Morrison, poet Nikki Giovanni, Ohio historical fiction writer Allan Eckart and Nancy Drew mystery writer Mildred Benson (who my wife met when they both worked for The Toledo Blade).
Who are some of your favorite authors who come from your state or country? Are there writers you like who write about place?