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1969–2025 · South Bend and Notre Dame (boundary); no Osceola tie found
Born here — South Bend. Susan Choi was born in South Bend on 28 January 1969 and lived there to the age of nine. Her six novels are The Foreign Student (1998), American Woman (2003), A Person of Interest (2008), My Education (2013), Trust Exercise (2019, National Book Award for Fiction), and Flashlight (2025); she has also published the picture book Camp Tiger. The tie is birth and childhood in the county seat. No Osceola residence, schooling, or subject tie appears in the record reached, and none is claimed.
The novelist of the city itself. Tess Gunty was born and raised in South Bend and graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2015. Her first novel, The Rabbit Hutch (2022), won the National Book Award; its fictional city, Vacca Vale, is modelled openly on South Bend — the river, the dead auto factory, the housing stock — so the county seat is not her backdrop but her subject. A second novel, Honeydew, has been announced for fall 2026. Her tie is the strongest local tie a novelist in this record carries — born, raised, and formed in South Bend, writing the city itself — and it is still a South Bend tie. Osceola appears in her work in no record reached.
Birth-alone, printed at birth-alone strength. Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend on 22 December 1905, at 828 Park Avenue (Indiana Historical Bureau marker 71.2017.1, installed 2017), and left for Chicago at twelve. His books — In What Hour (1940), The Phoenix and the Tortoise (1944), and the long body of poetry and translation that followed — belong to Chicago, San Francisco, and Santa Barbara. South Bend's share of Rexroth is a birthplace and a marker, and it is printed at exactly that size.
The Osceola test for this row ran against every name above and against the town's own record: no novelist born, raised, schooled, or resident in Osceola or Penn Township, and no novel set in Osceola, appears in the library and publisher records reached. The town's prose remains what the record carry — its historians.
Sources: publisher and National Book Award records for Choi and Gunty; South Bend Tribune and university records for Gunty's South Bend raising and Notre Dame class of 2015; Indiana Historical Bureau marker record 71.2017.1 for Rexroth; the banked Notable People and Sources for the Osceola negative.