With gentle humor, Hammond presents readers with the charms, aggravations, quirks, and disappointments of small-town life and frustrates any expectation that the past's deepest lessons are simple. In Ohio States: A Twentieth-Century Midwestern, Jeffrey Hammond asserts the quiet mysteries of an ordinary life. More than simply a glimpse of lie in the Midwest in the 1950s, this collection of well-crafted, touching narratives finds the author recalling his childhood and youth with a mixture of affection and alarm. Jeffrey Hammond is the George B. and Willma Reeves Distinguished Professor in the Liberal Arts and professor of English at St. Mary's College in Maryland. He has published Small Comforts: Essays at Middle Age (Kent State University Press, 2008) as well as numerous prize-winning essays in magazines and literary journals.