Trying to determine when Harriette Simpson Arnow began her life as a writer is like trying to identify the first genuine day of spring or fall. There are official dates, of course: she was twenty-seven when she published her first short story in 1934, and two years later she published her first novel. It is more difficult, however, to know precisely when she began to write, and when she first began to think of herself as a writer.

Arnow traced her beginnings as a writer back to her childhood, before she could read. The second-oldest of six children, she credits...

In midautumn 1934, at the age of twenty-six, Harriette Simpson came to Cincinnati. She lived in Cincinnati for six years, leaving in 1939, never to live here again. Those six years in Cincinnati were very important in Harriette Simpson’s life, both personally and professionally; the years spent here were formative and influential. During her years in Cincinnati, she published her first short stories, finished and published her first novel, gained “worldly” experience working at numerous odd jobs, worked as a writer for the Federal Writers Project of the WPA, and met and married Harold Arnow. As Wilton Eckley, her only...

That Harriette Arnow will go down in the American literary chronicle as a major figure is, at this point at least, highly improbable. Four conventionally written novels—in a time, unfortunately, when such have not been readily accepted by critics and scholars as being on the cutting edge of creativity—are hardly enough to establish her in the major category. As an artist, however, she certainly needs no defense. A realist who rejects such things as experimental forms, complex plots, sentimental themes, the pyrotechnics of sex, and the contemporary mania for neurotic protagonists, she combines in her work a penetrating...

When, at the age of 26, Harriette Simpson Arnow began to write her first novel, there were still no roads into much of Kentucky’s backwoods and mountains. The great migration of Southern Mountain people from hill to city had not yet started. But the young writer sensed that life as she had known it along the Cumberland in southeastern Kentucky was doomed. To keep a record of a culture and a people in the process of destruction, Harriette Arnow began writing her Kentucky trilogy; that writing spanned the next two decades.

“At an early age I saw my work as...

Aside from specialists in American literature and women’s studies, few people have heard of Harriette Arnow, and fewer still know any of her novels exceptThe Dollmaker(1954). Writing about hill people from her native state of Kentucky, she is alternately labeled a “woman” or a “regional” writer. While it is generally conceded that the former tag is pejorative, few have considered the assumptions behind the term “regional.” It is, I suspect, employed as condescendingly as the qualifier “woman”; a “regionalist” can be “good,” but only in a limited sphere.

A reason for the negative connotations of the classifier “regional”...

For several important reasons, Harriette Arnow’s novelsHunter’s HornandThe Dollmakermay be more widely read now than they were in the 1950s. Stories of Appalachian farmers lured to Detroit and Cincinnati by the promise of high wages, both novels convincingly describe the hopeless lives of the rural (and urban) poor. While Arnow’s characterization of male protagonists—like Nunn Ballew, the hunter ofHunter’s Horn—is excellent, her consistent forte is the portrayal of the Cumberland women, born to endless poverty and equally endless childbearing. The novels also re-create vividly the often unjust power of fundamentalist religion in these...

In 1960, six years after her great success withThe Dollmaker, and when she was fifty-two years old, Harriette Arnow finally realized a dream that had “haunted” her for thirty years, and that she had worked to fulfill for that long: she publishedSeedtime on the Cumberland, a history of the daily lives of the ordinary people of the Cumberland River country during the period of about 1780 to 1800. Three years later she published a companion volume,Flowering of the Cumberland. Her third nonfiction work (an autobiography and social history) was a slim volume for the Kentucky Bicentennial Bookshelf...

Despite the renewed interest in her writing in the last two decades, Harriette Simpson Arnow remains underrated. At best, she is known as the author ofThe Dollmaker(1954) or as the “obscure” writer of the novel on which Jane Fonda’s television movie of the same title was based. Not surprisingly, few readers are aware of Arnow’s finely crafted short stories.

Before her death in 1986, Arnow had published eight short stories: “Marigolds and Mules” inKosmos: Dynamic Stories of Today(1934), “A Mess of Pork” inThe New Talent(1935), “Washerwoman’s Day” in theSouthern Review(1936), “The Two...

In the spring of 1983, during a three-day visit to the campus of the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, Harriette Simpson Arnow delivered a public lecture entitled “Fact, Fancy, and Failure.” On one level, the talk contained a good deal of autobiographical information (“fact”) previously published in the 1963 “Introduction” toMountain Path(1936), inOld Burnside(1977), and in a number of interviews and secondary sources (Baer, Eckley, Hobbs, Lee). On another level, the lecture dealt with Arnow’s tracing of the development of her aesthetics through her clever application of “fancy” to the factual details of her life, region,...

“Between the Flowers,” Harriette Arnow’s unpublished novel, is a hefty, almost five-hundred-page, typed manuscript that gathers dust in the special collections at the University of Kentucky Library in Lexington. I have been curious about it ever since reading Glenda Hobbs’s fascinating study of Arnow’s early literary career, “Starting out in the Thirties: Harriette Arnow's Literary Genesis.” Written in the mid-1930s afterMountain Path(936) and beforeHunter’s Horn(1949), the manuscript, I felt, might provide some clues about Arnow’s development as a writer. I decided to examine it in more detail, with two questions in mind. First, I wanted to...

While “Between the Flowers,” an unpublished novel, was actually Harriette Arnow’s second work,Hunter’s Horn(1949), her second published novel, became a bestseller that received overwhelmingly favorable reviews when it was released. Set entirely in post-Depression, pre-World War II Kentucky, it is now almost always tagged a “regional” (therefore, minor) novel—as if any work depicting the land, people, and culture of a particular place must be gratuitously picturesque, provincial, and limited in appeal. Writers for theNew York Times Book Reviewin 1949 selectedHunter’s Hornas one of the ten best novels of the year and named it...

Harriette Arnow’sHunter’s Horn(1949) has too long been relegated to peripheral status as a regional novel, prized by fans of Appalachia for its lively treatment of “Little Smokey Creek” in the Cumberland Mountains. But Arnow’s compelling treatment of the conflict between independence and interdependence merits wider attention. Reviewers sensed something more than local color in the novel, hailing it as a potential Pulitzer Prize winner and comparing it toMoby-Dick. Arnow seems deliberately to invite such comparisons through her depiction of Nunn Ballew’s long and obsessive hunt for “King Devil,” a brazen and elusive fox. However, reviewers who attempted...

Among the characters rarely depicted in American fiction is a woman who is both a loving, responsible mother and an accomplished, productive artist. Perhaps few novels portray such a character because few female writers in the American literary canon have the experience of motherhood on which to draw for fictional material. In her recent provocative book,Silences,¹ Tillie Olsen notes the predominance of women writers without children in world literature throughout the ages. In American literary history the preponderance of such notable women writers is striking. Among them are Louisa May Alcott, Willa Cather, Emily Dickinson, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman,...

The Dollmaker(1954) completes Harriette Arnow’s Kentucky trilogy, which also includes Mountain Path (1936) andHunter’s Horn(1949); the novels are linked not only by their sympathetic portrayal of rural Cumberlanders, but also by their concern with characters who feel unable to act freely in a crisis.The Dollmakeris the best known of Arnow’s works and the one in which that concern has been the most misunderstood. Joyce Carol Oates has describedThe Dollmakeras “one of those excellent American works that have yet to be properly assessed, not only as excellent, but as very muchAmerican”(110). Despite...

Harriette Arnow’s account of a Kentucky hill family’s World War II migration to Detroit provides rich insight into how individual human realities were painfully recast in that transforming collective event. It is a narrative that is emotionally gripping, lavishly detailed, structurally complex, and intensely personal. It is, in short, a powerful story, and that, perhaps, is its principal value. But there is also much in this story that may be appreciated from the perspective of American literary, social, and cultural history. Its depiction of one Appalachian family’s participation in the migration of rural mountain people to large northern cities imaginatively...

Harriette Simpson Arnow liked to tell the story of how as a child she had rewritten her grandmother’s stories to suit herself. She went on to say that she was not so easily able to change the narrative that her mother imagined for Harriette’s life. But rewrite it she did, for she managed to leave the respectable teaching career her mother had urged upon her and move from Kentucky to Cincinnati to begin life as a writer. Arnow’s work is filled with ambivalence about her chosen profession, however. Not only was her family against it, but writing, for her, meant...

One wonders on the wisdom of bringing out again a first book written close to thirty years ago.Mountain Pathis to all practical purposes lost and dead. The original publisher, Covici-Friede, went out of business not long after the summer of 1936 when one small printing was made.

I like to think that now if writing it, I could do better. How good it is I do not know, for like the rest of my work, I have not read it since the last galleys, and anyway I would be unable to judge. There are doubtless some or even...

This article, which is the substance of the 1966 Clarence Burton Memorial Lecture, was delivered by Harriettete Simpson Arnow at the 94th Annual Meeting of the Historical Society of Michigan held in conjunction with the Michigan Museums Conference at Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Friday, October 18, 1968.

The occasion was a memorable one, heightened by Mrs. Arnow’s marvelously evocative account of the changing scene in Michigan over the last few decades. A novelist of note, she brought a delightfully different perception to the acute problem of the encroachment of the urban sprawl upon the virgin land.

A native of Kentucky, but...

I talked to Harriettete Simpson Arnow at her farmhouse on Nixon Road in Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 27 August 1983. Her husband, Harold, was present. The interview lasted about two hours and basically concerned her novels. Mrs. Arnow was 75, hard of hearing, and occasionally apologetic for digressing. But her sincere and patient answers to my questions provided great insights, not only into her books and writing process, but also into the personality of this author who genuinely respected her readers. The interview gave me the tantalizing pleasure of being shamelessly nosy and gossipy about people who were fictional, but...

Harriette Simpson Arnow gave this address to the Appalachian Writers Association, at Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky, on 29 June 1985. I recorded this lecture and completed my transcription after Professor Parks Lanier Jr., of the Department of English at Radford University, provided me with a clearer copy of the tape.

I will speak on help and hindrances in writing. A good many of those hindrances were my own fault. . . . In considering my talk here, I thought most of students and others who are writing, publishing, or those who are learning to write, and not of...