Is Ohio Literature a Thing? Should it Be?

No one flatly states that they can’t sell books with Midwestern settings, but it isn’t hard to notice that the flaws they do mention—too tragic, too many characters, not up-to-date—seem perfectly acceptable for novels set in an eastern urban environment or somewhere in Europe.

By Anesa Miller 

Ohio has been eliminated. Or it ought to be, according to several esoteric memes. Ohio is an existential threat soon to overwhelm the earth with a Slenderman in every motel closet and hellscape beaches where Lake Erie keeps catching on fire. Or is the name just a descriptor for something “lame and cringy” like the Columbus Dispatch suggests in a recent article updating parents and teachers on the kids’ latest slang? Possibly, these virtual and linguistic phenomena are the collective unconscious responding to Ohio’s red swing in 2016 and failure to swing back ever since—a metaphor for the expanding threat from Proud Boys or Juggalos or whatever niche group inspires anxiety these days.

But I’m attempting to take the questions that entitle this essay seriously: Is there a distinctly Ohio literature (in the classic, not the slang, sense), and why or why not? I’ve lived in Ohio for half my life, and since I also have ancestry here, it’s unsurprising that I’ve chosen to write about people who make their homes, and things that happen, here. After all, we’ve been admonished to “Write what you know,” and are urged to avoid appropriation of things we haven’t directly experienced. Moreover, I came up in the days when the “sense of place” was deemed crucial in both fiction and nonfiction, while pop philosophy suggested that blooming where one was planted could reveal wisdom.

However, I have come to suspect that “Midwestern,” much less “Ohio writer,” is not an alluring brand for anyone to embrace. More like something lame and cringy.

My first writing mentor was the late Nancy Zafris. I used to call her the Patron Saint of Ohio writers. Of course, she told me to cut that out. Nancy was born here, spent much of her life in Columbus, and set a good deal of her work in our state. Her wry, absurdist humor focuses on the struggle to understand what one really wants or needs. Nancy hit a lucky strike (not coincidentally, the title of her second novel), winning the Flannery O’Connor Award in 1990 and promptly landing a New York agent. Nonetheless, as her next manuscript made many rounds over the next decade, she was told more than once that Columbus, Ohio, was not a felicitous setting for a debut novel.

A quick aside: Remember when Charles Baxter, an author revered in both Minnesota and Michigan, hit the jackpot and lived to see his novel Feast of Love, not merely optioned, but produced as a feature film with Morgan Freeman and Selma Blair (2007)? For reasons that I’ve never seen fessed up to, the setting was changed from Ann Arbor, Michigan (Cambridge of the Midwest, but just not sexy enough), to Portland, Oregon (a hipster West Coast city).

I’ve gotten a similar impression from agents who’ve nibbled at my queries. No one flatly states that they can’t sell books with Midwestern settings, but it isn’t hard to notice that the flaws they do mention—too tragic, too many characters, not up-to-date—seem perfectly acceptable for novels set in an eastern urban environment or somewhere in Europe.

So I examined the settings of The New York Times’ top-rated fiction of the past ten years. Were some locations preferred to others? The answer is evident in the following table.

Figures are derived from “The Book Review’s Best Books since 2000,” published in the The New York Times on April 29, 2024. Details of methodology and other aspects of this study are available in Anesa Miller, “By The Numbers: The New York Times’ Best Book Ratings,” The Middle West Review, Vol. 11, no. 1 (Fall 2024). Or by inquiry via www.anesamiller.com.

The New York metropolitan area is far and away The Times’ favorite fictional setting. Continental Europe and the American Northeast come in second and third, with the British Isles and Asia and the Pacific tied for fourth. The South is the next most-favored North American setting, followed by the Midwest, which edges ahead of the West, thanks largely to novels set in Chicago. Among all the Midwestern locations, I found nine novels on the list from 2014 through 2023, that take place, at least partially, in Ohio.

I’ve heard people laugh about the numerous books set, published, and praised in New York, as if it’s only to be expected that anyone living in the publishing capital of the world must, naturally, love their city best. But are Ohio writers and readers okay with this imbalance at our national “newspaper of record”? Is there anything we can do about it? Can we make our literature A Thing?

I’m confident no one denies that brilliant writers associated with Ohio have made major contributions to world literature. Nobel laureate Toni Morrison was born and raised in Lorain, and her first novel, The Bluest Eye takes place there. America’s first Nobelist was Sinclair Lewis, who hailed from Minnesota but became well known for his satire, Babbitt, widely believed to be set in Ohio, since the author lived in Cincinnati while conducting research. Sherwood Anderson is often deemed Ohio’s first homegrown fiction writer: born, raised and largely self-educated in Marion and Sandusky Counties. Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio of 1919 has been acclaimed as one of the first novels of Modernist literature.

(Readers will please forgive me for declining to bring Hillbilly Elegy into the mix here. It’s clearly a major work that has influenced views of Ohio held by numerous American readers. But such an explicitly politico-cultural project cries out for its own special treatment in a separate essay.)

More than a hundred years ago, both Anderson and Lewis were recruited to the programmatic disparagement of small-town life featured in New York based periodicals. This typically translated into contempt for the Midwest at large. Writers native to the region were praised for: “revolt[ing] against their native village life in the Middle West…provincialism…[and the] bitterness of small town life,” as Alfred Kazin wrote (in Brooklyn) in 1942. (Quoted in Jon K. Lauck, From warm center to ragged edge: The erosion of Midwestern literary and historical regionalism, 1920-1965, (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2017), p. 13).

Anderson, for one, did not recognize such characterizations of his work. By refusing to idealize the modest life he knew in rural Ohio, he was pigeonholed as its ardent detractor while language coming from East Coast critics became overwhelming negative. This disconnect has been diagnosed as a symptom of the waning of America’s agrarian era and the growing power of urban centers. After all, for Greenwich Village to become a mecca, other locations had to appear undesirable. One mid-century historian remarked, “When city folk took notice of the rural world, it was a dull foreign country ‘out there’…an exploitable colony, …an anachronistic brake upon progress …or as a source of amusement. A well-worn vocabulary of condescension reflected urban superiority (bumpkin, hick, yokel, hayseed, clodhopper) as did cow-pasture jokes and popular ‘rube songs’…” (James H. Shideler, “ ‘Flappers, Philosophers’ and Farmers: Urban-Rural Tensions of the Twenties,” Agricultural History, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Oct., 1973), pp. 283-299 https://www.jstor.org/stable/3741594 ).

Anderson protested with a letter to one of the first critics who lumped him into the “anti-village” coterie. He insisted that, “I have always lived with these people…I do wish to stand by these people.” But the intellectual establishment maintained its assessment of his work through most of the twentieth century: If it’s good literature, it must denounce the Midwest; if it defends small-town Babbittry, it must be no good. From “rube songs” to “flyover country,” many things remain the same while superficially changing.

With Ohio’s founding novelist so thoroughly misinterpreted that he’s known to this day for demeaning his home state, what hope is there for the rest of us who would like to depict our humble locale?

My old mentor Nancy Zafris finally saw her first novel, The Metal Shredders, published in 2002. It became a New York Times notable book. Nancy went on to serve for many years as the Kenyon Review’s fiction editor, series editor of the O’Connor Award, and became a recipient of several major prizes. She published five books and was a beloved teacher, although I don’t believe she ever held an academic position. For reasons best known to someone other than me, however, she is included in neither the Ohioana nor the Cleveland Public Library’s extensive compendia of noted Ohio authors, many of whom spent far fewer years in our state and rarely, if ever, wrote about it.

It appears we still live with a major disconnect.

Returning to my opening questions, does an explicitly Ohio literature even exist? Obviously, to address this, one needs a working definition. How about the criteria established by the abovementioned compendia of noted Ohio authors? Having a birthplace in Ohio, living here for a limited period, and writing a book about Ohio are each sufficient to be considered one of ours.

Okay. A quick look at the Cleveland Public Library’s Ohio Authors list reveals that we’re suffering a brain drain. Many New York editors and journalists are transplanted Midwesterners, so they are part of this trend. Of course, Americans need to take jobs where they find them, or to live where their families need to be, and everyone typically prefers the most lucrative or prestigious job available. One result is that Ohio’s most successful writers almost universally leave our state, while those who remain struggle to gain sufficient recognition for their own neighbors to take them seriously.

A few fun facts about noted Ohio authors:

Pulitzer laureate Michael Cunningham was born in Cincinnati, although his family moved to California in his boyhood. Seeking a backwoods setting for the early scenes of his second novel, A Home at the End of the World (1990), he chose suburban Cleveland, only to send his characters to New York City as soon as they’re old enough to make their own decisions. Eventually, they migrate west again, settling in California. Cunningham himself spent time in Hollywood and has taught his craft at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, and at Brooklyn College, near which he now resides. A major theme of the book is the difficulty young persons of non-conforming sexualities face in finding a place to belong. I entirely empathize with those who face such situations, but is shunning a vast swath of geography the only solution our fiction can envision?

Celeste Ng was born in Pittsburgh PA but attended school in Shaker Heights, Ohio, and set her first two novels in that region. Everything I Never Told You (2014) and Little Fires Everywhere (published 2017, adapted for Hulu in 2020) both explore the microaggressions and overt racism inflicted on people of color in smug, insular towns with largely White populations. The East Coast sends out its siren’s call to young and old alike with its promise of Ivy League affiliation and sophisticated opportunities. We know from the opening sentence of both these books that, despite their best efforts, the characters are cruising toward disaster resulting from their self-imposed limitations. Ng’s third novel, Our Missing Hearts (2022), begins in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she now lives. It depicts a young boy’s quest to recover his suppressed history in a dystopian New York City.

Tony Doerr, our most recent Pulitzer Prize winner, grew up in Cleveland and received a master’s degree from Bowling Green State University. His first novel, About Grace (2015), hinges on a sequence set in suburban Cleveland, where a young father dreams of a thousand-year flood on the Chagrin River that threatens to sweep away his infant daughter. Convinced that the dream will come true unless he separates himself from his family, the father boards a steamer for a distant Caribbean Island. There he remains for twenty-five years, until a long-delayed reconciliation with the daughter occurs in Alaska. Roughly one eighth of the book takes place in Ohio. Doerr’s fecund imagination then led him to the extraordinary interconnections between a French girl and a German boy amid a European war in his award-winning All the Light We Cannot See (2017). From there, he ventured all the way to fifteenth-century Constantinople and interstellar space in Cloud Cuckoo Land (2022). Tony Doerr currently lives in Boise, Idaho.

These examples of Ohio literature, created by authors recognized by our public institutions, are outstanding, widely appreciated works of contemporary fiction. But the pattern of moving up and away remains disappointing. Consider Louise Erdrich who has continued to write about the Dakotas and upper Midwest since 1984. Or Ivan Doig who extolled the people and landscapes of Montana from 1978 through 2015. When I attended the University of Idaho, I learned that Western regional writing is esteemed from Las Cruces to Bellingham. Regionalism is a boon, not a stigma, to writers like Craig Johnson, Mary Clearman Blew, Kent Haruf, Rudy Anaya and others who have stayed put and published in the West, applauded by local and regional readers, as well as many across the country.

Why should Ohio be a mere steppingstone to grander things elsewhere? Maybe the second question in my title is more salient than the first: Should there be an Ohio literature? Does anyone care? Are we so used to being dismissed that we’re content to dismiss ourselves? If readers were to demand more books reflecting their lived experience in our state, presumably the marketplace would respond. But when no one wants a snow shovel in July, those items tend to vanish from the hardware store.

No doubt the whiff of sour grapes is evident in this essay. But I must hope that somewhere, deep-down, Ohioans want alternatives to the East Coast publishing hegemony. We could celebrate homegrown stories and tellers that address concerns close to our hearts. Following the locavore motto that has proved such a boon to many a hometown restaurant, we need Ohioans to “Read Local!” We need readers to care about their own region as least as much as they have cared about Brooklyn, Kabul, the sequoia groves of the Pacific Northwest, and other far-flung (and, indeed, fascinating) parts of the world. We need readers to believe that seriously interesting writers might choose to spend their lives in a small town or Rust Belt city. Our books just might be worth picking up.

Are there villains in this tale of woe for the Midwestern writer who hopes to abide in her home region and characterize its people in fictional prose?

How will our readers, wearied by yet another New York story, discover regional tales when local media is in decline? It’s virtually impossible for an unknown author, even—if not especially—one who lives down the street, to get a book reviewed in once-august outlets that served our areas for generations. The Cleveland Plain Dealer, Columbus Dispatch, and Toledo Blade rarely carry, and still less often produce, book features. When they do include the rare review, big houses garner the attention just as they have the most sway to purchase prime placement in brick-and-mortar stores and solicit New York Times reviews. An author directly approaching newspapers or city magazines to offer review copies of a new book is disdained as a desperate self-publisher unworthy of reply. As journalists have observed, the collapse of local news is a culprit of many misdeeds.

Another detriment to the cause may be some aspects of our academic systems. Institutions of higher education require a “journeyman” stage for scholars they prepare for professional service: Those earning bachelor’s or master’s degrees are not considered for tenure-track positions at the same institution. There may be valid reasons for such policies, but they also have the downside of preventing people from putting down roots. I know of one case in which English Department chairs wanted to make an exception for an outstanding local graduate who loved our town and badly wanted to remain; a higher administrator vetoed the job offer. Likewise, other reward systems may not be best structured to help writers build the broader reputation required to gain recognition for their work. Literary magazines everywhere would like to be considered among the best anywhere; that often precludes any penchant for featuring regional authors.

Shaking off East Coast literary colonization is sure to be a heavy lift. How will readers raise their consciousness and decide to join the effort? One can only hope that awareness may grow over time. Readers should spread the word that less than one percent of New York’s favorite books in a decade took place in Ohio. Isn’t it time to find a less cliquish cadre of literary luminaries—high time we created, established and respected our own authority? With Carol Kennicott, Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street heroine, we could, at least, keep faith with ourselves.

Anesa Miller is a poet, essayist and novelist. Her novels, Our Orbit and I Never Do This, were published in 2024 by Sibylline Press. Born in Wichita, Kansas, Anesa has made her home in Ohio since 1985 and is a recipient of an Artist’s Fellowship in creative writing from the Ohio Arts Council. She holds a PhD in Russian literature from the University of Kansas and an MFA from the University of Idaho. Her writing has been published widely in literary and scholarly periodicals.