LABOUR OF A LIFETIME

LABOUR OF A LIFETIME Motivation H ELEN HOOVEN SANTMYER was an American writer, educator and librarian. She is primarily known for her best-selling epic, And the Ladies of the Club, published when she was in her eighties. The following is one of the incidents in Helen Hooven Santmyer’s life (1895-1986) which can inspire us and motivate us in our lives. At one point of time in her life, while working as a librarian in a reference section, she started to write a book. At first she worked on it in her spare time. Then, ill health forced her to retire. She continued her work in the nursing home where she was hospitalized. She wrote the whole book out herself, in long hand, on a ledger. After completing her work she presented it to the Ohio State University Press for publication. The final manuscript filled eleven boxes. A handful of copies were printed, but the book met with no initial success. It seemed as if Helen Hooven Santmyer’s name would vanish without trace from the American literary scene. Then one person who bought the book read it and liked it. He was praising it in an Ohio library one day, when the librarian overheard his conversation. The word was passed on to a producer, then to an agent, and then to the American Book Club. Each party found the book entrancing and worthy of a greater audience. Finally, Helen Hooven Santmyer’s book entitled “And Ladies of the Club”, was nominated for the Book Club Award. It won the award, and with it a sum of over a million dollars. Helen Hooven Santmyer did not seek fame or wealth from her novel. Its topic—the story of two Ohio families in the period between the American Civil War and the great depression of the early 1930’s, was obviously not aimed at the commercial market. The author believed that Sinclair Lewis had painted a false portrait of the American dream in his novel of the 1920’s “Main Street”. She wanted to correct that picture, as Haynes Johnson writes in the Washington Post. The author was clearly not in the market for big bucks. She obviously was motivated by saying something which she believed. The bare account of how she produced the work over the years, in her spare time, in Strong belief in something makes one rise above one's worldly situation. It makes one concentrate on one's goals in life.