Helen Hooven Santmyer was an American writer, teacher, librarian, and college administrator born on November 25, 1895 in Cincinnati, Ohio. She was raised and spent most of her life in Xenia, Ohio, which later became the inspiration for three of her books. She graduated from Wellesley College in 1918 and the University of Oxford in 1927, and later served as an English teacher at Xenia High School, the Dean of Women at Cedarville College (as of 2022, Cedarville University), and a librarian at the Dayton Public Library. In 1959, she turned her attention to writing full-time and wrote multiple novels and essay collections. Intermittently throughout her career, Santmyer wrote a 1300-page epic novel, "...And Ladies of the Club", which was published by the Ohio State University Press in 1982, when she was eighty-seven years old. The novel later reached the New York Times bestseller list, where it stayed for thirty-seven weeks, seven of those weeks reaching the number one spot on the list. Helen Hooven Santmyer died in Xenia, Ohio on February 21, 1986, at the age of 90.