Harriette Louisa Simpson Arnow

Harriette Arnow is perhaps best known as the writer of numerous historical novels that dramatize the lives of Appalachian people. These works include The Doll Maker, Hunter's Horn, and Seedtime on the Cumberland. In this life history interview, Arnow offers a vivid overview of her family heritage, reaching back to the Revolutionary Era. Born July 7, 1908 in Wayne County, Kentucky, Arnow's upbringing as she describes it was representative of family relationships in the Appalachian region. Born into a family of five daughters and one son, Arnow describes the role of Southern gender norms in her life and emphasizes her experiences in school. Especially illuminating is Arnow's description of her college days, first at Berea and then later at the University of Louisville. In her early twenties, Arnow worked as a schoolteacher, and briefly as a principal, in small, rural communities. By the 1930s, however, she began to pursue writing. Many of her published works were drawn from her experiences growing up in the South. Other revealing aspects of Arnow's life covered in this interview include her decision not to marry until she was in her thirties, her experiences in balancing work and family, her views on labor politics in the 1930s, and her reaction to critiques of her writing as both "transcendentalist" and "feminist."

The settling of southern Kentucky and middle Tennessee from pre-Revolutionary times to the beginning of the nineteenth century is described in everyday detail by Harriette Arnow, the author of The Dollmaker. "It is the art of pioneering rather than the acts of individuals in the westward movement that gives backbone to this book," wrote historian Thomas D. Clark in the New York Times Book Review. "The author takes her reader along the early trails, onto the land, into. The cabins, and even into the private lives of the people."

"Masterfully wrought and keenly observed, Mountain Path draws on Harriette Simpson Arnow?s experiences as a schoolteacher in downtrodden Pulaski County, Kentucky, deep in the heart of Appalachia, prior to WWII. Far from a quaint portrait of rural life, Arnow?s novel documents hardships, poverty, illiteracy, and struggles. She also recognizes a fragile cultural richness, one characterized by ?those who like open fires, hounds, children, human talk and song instead of TV and radio, the wisdom of the old who had seen all of life from birth to death,? and which has since been eroded by the advent of highways and industry. In Mountain Path, Arnow exquisitely captures the voices, faces, and ways of a people she cared for deeply, and who evoked in her a deep respect and admiration."

Gertie Nevels and her husband Clovis are untouched by city life until the outbreak of World War II. They are forced to abandon their Kentucky mountain home and travel to Detroit so that Clovis can participate in the war effort by repairing heavy machinery. Gertie's survival techniques are useless in an urban milieu. In spite of the debasing effect of city life, Gertie maintains her faith in her fellow beings.

"Between the Flowers is Harriette Simpson Arnow's second novel. Written in the 1930s, but unpublished until now, this early work shows the development of social and cultural themes that would continue in Arnow's later work: the appeal of wandering and of modern life, the countervailing desire to stay within a traditional community, and the difficulties of communication between women and men in such a community."--BOOK JACKET. "Between the Flowers goes far beyond categories of "local color," literary regionalism, or the agrarian novel, to the heart of human relationships in a modernizing world. Arnow, who went on to write Hunters' Horn (1949) and The Dollmaker (1954) - her two most famous works - has continually been overlooked by critics as a regional writer. Ironically, it is her stinging realism that is seen as evidence of her regionalism, evidence that she is of the Cumberland - an area somehow more "regional" than others."--BOOK JACKET.

xvii, 259 pages ; 23 cm

"In Hunter's Horn, Arnow has written the quintessential account of Kentucky hill people--the quintessential novel of Southern Appalachian farmers, foxhunters, foxhounds, women, and children. New York Times reviewer Hirschel Brickell declared that Arnow "writes...as effortlessly as a bird sings, and the warmth, beauty, the sadness and the ache of life itself are not even once absent from her pages." Arnow writes about Kentucky in the way that William Faulkner writes about Mississippi, that Flannery O'Connor writes about Georgia, or that Willa Cather writes about Nebraska--with studied realism, with landscapes and characters that take on mythic proportions, with humor, and with memorable and remarkable attention to details of the human heart that motivate literature."--Amazon.

Surveyor William David Leslie Collins struggles with other settlers to live in the Kentucky winderness.

The author, a distinguished Kentucky writer, recounts her own personal history of the town of Burnside, and then goes on to relate how much the old way of life is still embedded into the area, and why it is an important part of "the fabric of the history of Kentucky and the nation."--Cover.