Harriette Arnow (1908–1986)
Author of The Dollmaker
About the Author
Image credit: New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction Number LC-USZ62-117675
Series
Works by Harriette Arnow
Nukentekijä. Osa 2 2 copies
Le couteau 1 copy
Associated Works
Reader's Digest Condensed Books: Run Silent, Run Deep / The Dollmaker / Crusader's Tomb / Hunter / Mischief (1955) — Contributor — 2 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Legal name
- Arnow, Harriette Simpson
- Birthdate
- 1908-07-07
- Date of death
- 1986-03-22
- Gender
- female
- Education
- University of Louisville
Berea College - Occupations
- teacher
novelist
short story writer - Organizations
- Federal Writers' Project
- Awards and honors
- Weatherford Award (Special, 1978)
- Short biography
- Harriette Louisa Simpson Arnow was born and raised in Kentucky. She began writing as a young girl. She spent two years at Berea College, then transferred to the University of Louisville, where she graduated in 1931. After teaching in rural Appalachia for two years, she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she worked for the Federal Writers' Project of the WPA. Her first short stories were published in Esquire Magazine under the name H.L. Simpson. Her first novel, Mountain Path, appeared in 1936. In 1939, she married Harold B. Arnow and the couple later moved to Detroit, the setting for her best-known work, The Dollmaker (1954). During her career, she produced five novels, two nonfiction books, a short autobiography, and about 30 short stories, essays, and book reviews.
- Nationality
- USA
- Birthplace
- Monticello, Wayne County, Kentucky, USA
- Places of residence
- Burnside, Kentucky, USA
Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Detroit, Michigan, USA
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA - Place of death
- Washtenaw County, Michigan, USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
"In the end they all...most...adjust"
By sally tarbox on 1 Dec. 2013
Format: Mass Market Paperback
A beautiful and heart wrenching novel: it opens with Gertie Nevels, a tough hillbilly woman, taking her sick child to hospital. Unafraid to perform surgery on him to save his life, or to force a reluctant army officer to give them a lift, Gertie seems in control of her life - not least her plans to purchase their own farm in her beloved Kentucky with her secret savings, once her husband is called show more up to fight in WW2.
But when her husband is sent instead to work in a Detroit factory, Gertie bows to the pressure of those around her to join her man, and she and her children find themselves in one of the overcrowded and slumlike 'projects'.
Gertie, the 'dollmaker' of the title, seeks release from her surroundings by losing herself in her woodcarving; the creation of a figure of Christ slowly takes shape throughout the novel, despite her family's pressure to turn out cheap, tawdry dolls on a jig-saw, to make a few dollars.
How the family make out in this vastly different environment, where war takes lives but simultaneously guarantees jobs; where different religions and races are brought together; where the beauties of nature are far removed from the furnaces of the steel mills, makes for an unforgettable novel. The unexpected ending really left me reeling. show less
By sally tarbox on 1 Dec. 2013
Format: Mass Market Paperback
A beautiful and heart wrenching novel: it opens with Gertie Nevels, a tough hillbilly woman, taking her sick child to hospital. Unafraid to perform surgery on him to save his life, or to force a reluctant army officer to give them a lift, Gertie seems in control of her life - not least her plans to purchase their own farm in her beloved Kentucky with her secret savings, once her husband is called show more up to fight in WW2.
But when her husband is sent instead to work in a Detroit factory, Gertie bows to the pressure of those around her to join her man, and she and her children find themselves in one of the overcrowded and slumlike 'projects'.
Gertie, the 'dollmaker' of the title, seeks release from her surroundings by losing herself in her woodcarving; the creation of a figure of Christ slowly takes shape throughout the novel, despite her family's pressure to turn out cheap, tawdry dolls on a jig-saw, to make a few dollars.
How the family make out in this vastly different environment, where war takes lives but simultaneously guarantees jobs; where different religions and races are brought together; where the beauties of nature are far removed from the furnaces of the steel mills, makes for an unforgettable novel. The unexpected ending really left me reeling. show less
I’m slightly in awe of Harriette Simpson Arnow. I consider her to be one of America’s greatest writers.
A couple of years ago I read The Dollmaker and thought it was one of the best books I’d ever read. After reading Mountain Path and Hunter’s Horn I’m not even convinced The Dollmaker was the best book she wrote. It was her most widely read novel (and accessible) and was the final book in her Appalachian trilogy. I’m not going to split hairs and pick a favourite, they were all show more brilliant.
Harriette Simpson was born in 1908, in Wayne County, Kentucky, and grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians, close to where the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River emerges from the East Kentucky Coalfield. She attended Berea College as a teenager and the became a teacher in a one room school in Pulaski County, Kentucky. Mountain Path isn’t an autobiography, but it based on her experiences. Most of her fiction is based in that area (along with the migration North from Kentucky) and she writes about how the economic and social framework of rural hill communities was changed by electricity, education, roads, the World Wars. Moonshine and family feuds are never far from the surface. It is mainly men folk being stupid. But it’s her observations about women that shapes her writing so brilliantly:
"She thought of the other women with children in their arms who would come over this road before a 100 years ago, 50 years ago, this evening. They too must have known trouble and fear for their men. What were there what were their secret wifely thoughts? Did they feel secure and safe and filled with husband and children or were they like herself - empty, trying to live so as to feel nothing, watching, thinking , "This is not my life. I am preparing for my real life. Someday I shall live and be a success. I am already ashamed that I was so frightened a little while ago over a man who is nothing to me. But I remember that once I rode on unafraid in the dark and carried a baby in my arms."
She also wrote two books and the cultural and social history of the region:
Seedtime on the Cumberland
Flowering of the Cumberland
I'm currently reading Seedtime on the Cumberland and it is excellent.
She was passionate about the landscape and the fauna, it jumps off every page. You can almost smell her novels.
The vernacular may put you off, but celebrate it. I loved the dialogue, it wasn’t too far away from how my grandparents spoke (they were from Yorkshire).
"If' n so much ez two hawgs git tu fightin' don't take side with neither."
The prose is etched with dialect, and it brings Appalachian people to life. Maybe it was this regionalist approach that made her a slightly obscure writer, but this very approach to the region also gave a very universal experience. Her characterisation was sublime, never condescending or overly sentimental.
In Mountain Path I fell in love, fell out of love, laughed, cried and screamed. The ending (and it is a bit of a page turner) made me howl at the moon.
I was very lucky insomuch as I read this with my wonderful friend Lori Keeton. She is such a great reading partner, and coming from Kentucky she is the most perfect friend for reading Harriette Simpson Arnow. We read Hunter’s Horn together also. I’m so fortunate to have a friend who had the smarts to explain the bits I didn’t understand, and to act as a translator when needed. Thanks Lori!
Here is her wonderful review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6949964838
It’s a real shame that her books are so hard to access, because I believe Harriette Simpson Arnow to be one of America’s best ever writers. I understand that they are hard to get hold of, and I would lend you my copy, only it’s too good to loan out. It’s a book that’s too close to my heart. You know that feeling. So if you have a birthday, or an occasion on the horizon, ask somebody to find you a copy of Mountain Path, or Hunter’s Horn. Read them both. Celebrate this wonderful author, you won’t regret it. show less
A couple of years ago I read The Dollmaker and thought it was one of the best books I’d ever read. After reading Mountain Path and Hunter’s Horn I’m not even convinced The Dollmaker was the best book she wrote. It was her most widely read novel (and accessible) and was the final book in her Appalachian trilogy. I’m not going to split hairs and pick a favourite, they were all show more brilliant.
Harriette Simpson was born in 1908, in Wayne County, Kentucky, and grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians, close to where the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River emerges from the East Kentucky Coalfield. She attended Berea College as a teenager and the became a teacher in a one room school in Pulaski County, Kentucky. Mountain Path isn’t an autobiography, but it based on her experiences. Most of her fiction is based in that area (along with the migration North from Kentucky) and she writes about how the economic and social framework of rural hill communities was changed by electricity, education, roads, the World Wars. Moonshine and family feuds are never far from the surface. It is mainly men folk being stupid. But it’s her observations about women that shapes her writing so brilliantly:
"She thought of the other women with children in their arms who would come over this road before a 100 years ago, 50 years ago, this evening. They too must have known trouble and fear for their men. What were there what were their secret wifely thoughts? Did they feel secure and safe and filled with husband and children or were they like herself - empty, trying to live so as to feel nothing, watching, thinking , "This is not my life. I am preparing for my real life. Someday I shall live and be a success. I am already ashamed that I was so frightened a little while ago over a man who is nothing to me. But I remember that once I rode on unafraid in the dark and carried a baby in my arms."
She also wrote two books and the cultural and social history of the region:
Seedtime on the Cumberland
Flowering of the Cumberland
I'm currently reading Seedtime on the Cumberland and it is excellent.
She was passionate about the landscape and the fauna, it jumps off every page. You can almost smell her novels.
The vernacular may put you off, but celebrate it. I loved the dialogue, it wasn’t too far away from how my grandparents spoke (they were from Yorkshire).
"If' n so much ez two hawgs git tu fightin' don't take side with neither."
The prose is etched with dialect, and it brings Appalachian people to life. Maybe it was this regionalist approach that made her a slightly obscure writer, but this very approach to the region also gave a very universal experience. Her characterisation was sublime, never condescending or overly sentimental.
In Mountain Path I fell in love, fell out of love, laughed, cried and screamed. The ending (and it is a bit of a page turner) made me howl at the moon.
I was very lucky insomuch as I read this with my wonderful friend Lori Keeton. She is such a great reading partner, and coming from Kentucky she is the most perfect friend for reading Harriette Simpson Arnow. We read Hunter’s Horn together also. I’m so fortunate to have a friend who had the smarts to explain the bits I didn’t understand, and to act as a translator when needed. Thanks Lori!
Here is her wonderful review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/6949964838
It’s a real shame that her books are so hard to access, because I believe Harriette Simpson Arnow to be one of America’s best ever writers. I understand that they are hard to get hold of, and I would lend you my copy, only it’s too good to loan out. It’s a book that’s too close to my heart. You know that feeling. So if you have a birthday, or an occasion on the horizon, ask somebody to find you a copy of Mountain Path, or Hunter’s Horn. Read them both. Celebrate this wonderful author, you won’t regret it. show less
The Dollmaker is the story of Gertie Nevels, a Kentucky woman who is uprooted from the home that she loves and forced to live in Detroit during the Second World War. It is a tragedy that springs from the loss of agrarian life to industrial labor, the misunderstands and lack of communications between spouses, and the burying of the artistic spirit and individuality beneath the struggle to simply exist.
There are dozens of ideas in this book that could be discussed and debated at length, but show more what kept coming to the fore for me was the way one life, one person, can be smothered in the crowd of humanity, and how much humanity itself suffers for this every time it happens. Life in Detroit is a nightmare for Gertie, but not only for Gertie; the alley she lives in is peopled with lives being beaten down and wasted. The factions that divide these people are much less obvious to the reader than the squalid ties that bind them. The contrast between the deprivations of the farm life that begins the novel and the deprivations of the life Gertie finds in Detroit are stark, and while Kentucky is not paradise, it would appear to be when weighed against Detroit.
There is also the religious element that runs through the book: “Religious” in the broadest sense of the word. For Gertie is searching for God, for Christ, and even for Judas. She looks to understand her fate and whether her choices are truly her own or ordained by some higher power. Indeed, there are times when I wondered where God is in the lives of so many helpless and vulnerable people. As is usually the case, the people who most profess to speak in His name are the least like Him.
My heart was broken so many times during the reading of this novel that it felt sometimes as if there were an iron band squeezing it. It is in excess of 600 pages and I strongly feel that not a word is wasted. Right into the Favorites folder with this one, with my only complaint being that the print in the version I was reading was insufferably small for these old eyes. I suppose I will need to be on the lookout for a copy with larger print, since I can easily see the need to read it again someday. show less
There are dozens of ideas in this book that could be discussed and debated at length, but show more what kept coming to the fore for me was the way one life, one person, can be smothered in the crowd of humanity, and how much humanity itself suffers for this every time it happens. Life in Detroit is a nightmare for Gertie, but not only for Gertie; the alley she lives in is peopled with lives being beaten down and wasted. The factions that divide these people are much less obvious to the reader than the squalid ties that bind them. The contrast between the deprivations of the farm life that begins the novel and the deprivations of the life Gertie finds in Detroit are stark, and while Kentucky is not paradise, it would appear to be when weighed against Detroit.
There is also the religious element that runs through the book: “Religious” in the broadest sense of the word. For Gertie is searching for God, for Christ, and even for Judas. She looks to understand her fate and whether her choices are truly her own or ordained by some higher power. Indeed, there are times when I wondered where God is in the lives of so many helpless and vulnerable people. As is usually the case, the people who most profess to speak in His name are the least like Him.
My heart was broken so many times during the reading of this novel that it felt sometimes as if there were an iron band squeezing it. It is in excess of 600 pages and I strongly feel that not a word is wasted. Right into the Favorites folder with this one, with my only complaint being that the print in the version I was reading was insufferably small for these old eyes. I suppose I will need to be on the lookout for a copy with larger print, since I can easily see the need to read it again someday. show less
I got yer Great American Novel right here.
In the years just prior to American entry into World War II, Nunn Ballew is raising his family, trying to restore the family land that he bought back with money earned in the mines, and hunting an especially pernicious red fox, known as King Devil, who has been plaguing the district and killing far too much livestock since Ballew's return five years earlier. Nunn is obsessed with King Devil, and during fox season, it's a major distraction from needed show more farm work, which he knows is vital to his long-term plans.
But this isn't just Nunn's story. It is every bit as much the story of his wife Milly, his daughter Suse, the local midwife Sue Annie, and an interconnected web of extended family and neighbors in the area of Little Smoky Creek, Kentucky.
The lives of the Kentucky hill people are hard, and they're just coming out of the Great Depression and into the beginnings of the Second World War. Some of the men are working for the WPA; others, like Nunn, are cautiously exploring the benefits of working with the AAA and county agricultural agents. And they're running their foxhounds most nights during fox season, trying to get King Devil.
Meanwhile, for all that the men are juggling, the women's lives are harder. Food grown needs to be canned, smoked, ground, baked, processed somehow to last from harvest to the next growing season. Nunn's decision to buy two purebred foxhounds means selling what would have been their winter meat that year. Improvements to the farm mean no money for Sunday shoes or the bus to high school in town for Suse. Milly and Suse and the oldest boy, Lee Roy, work hard to make ends meet and fill in the gaps Nunn leaves when he's running his hounds, but often see themselves going without things that make them feel exposed before other wives and older children among the neighbors.
And it's Sue Annie and Milly who labor long, hard, and heartbreakingly to save a neighbor's youngest child, while haunted by memories of their own lost children.
This is an intimate and moving look at life among the hill people. It's an older time and a different place than most of us know. The lower status and hard conditions for women are accepted by all as the natural order, and Arnow doesn't regard it as alien, but she also show the ways in which the women are the strength and necessary binding of the families and the whole community. Nunn seems to have a suspicion, a hope, that his daughter can do something more, if he can find the means to let her. He seems to be catching wind of how the changes disrupting their community can bring good as well as ill--but it's a hard, challenging time, and nothing comes easily.
There's some emotionally rough stuff here, and it's not a cheerful, chirpy, happily-eve-after ending. Neither is it grim and hopeless and negative for everyone.
This is a rich, strong, narrative about a piece of American life and culture that rarely gets respect or understanding.
Recommended for everyone with pulse.
I bought this book. show less
In the years just prior to American entry into World War II, Nunn Ballew is raising his family, trying to restore the family land that he bought back with money earned in the mines, and hunting an especially pernicious red fox, known as King Devil, who has been plaguing the district and killing far too much livestock since Ballew's return five years earlier. Nunn is obsessed with King Devil, and during fox season, it's a major distraction from needed show more farm work, which he knows is vital to his long-term plans.
But this isn't just Nunn's story. It is every bit as much the story of his wife Milly, his daughter Suse, the local midwife Sue Annie, and an interconnected web of extended family and neighbors in the area of Little Smoky Creek, Kentucky.
The lives of the Kentucky hill people are hard, and they're just coming out of the Great Depression and into the beginnings of the Second World War. Some of the men are working for the WPA; others, like Nunn, are cautiously exploring the benefits of working with the AAA and county agricultural agents. And they're running their foxhounds most nights during fox season, trying to get King Devil.
Meanwhile, for all that the men are juggling, the women's lives are harder. Food grown needs to be canned, smoked, ground, baked, processed somehow to last from harvest to the next growing season. Nunn's decision to buy two purebred foxhounds means selling what would have been their winter meat that year. Improvements to the farm mean no money for Sunday shoes or the bus to high school in town for Suse. Milly and Suse and the oldest boy, Lee Roy, work hard to make ends meet and fill in the gaps Nunn leaves when he's running his hounds, but often see themselves going without things that make them feel exposed before other wives and older children among the neighbors.
And it's Sue Annie and Milly who labor long, hard, and heartbreakingly to save a neighbor's youngest child, while haunted by memories of their own lost children.
This is an intimate and moving look at life among the hill people. It's an older time and a different place than most of us know. The lower status and hard conditions for women are accepted by all as the natural order, and Arnow doesn't regard it as alien, but she also show the ways in which the women are the strength and necessary binding of the families and the whole community. Nunn seems to have a suspicion, a hope, that his daughter can do something more, if he can find the means to let her. He seems to be catching wind of how the changes disrupting their community can bring good as well as ill--but it's a hard, challenging time, and nothing comes easily.
There's some emotionally rough stuff here, and it's not a cheerful, chirpy, happily-eve-after ending. Neither is it grim and hopeless and negative for everyone.
This is a rich, strong, narrative about a piece of American life and culture that rarely gets respect or understanding.
Recommended for everyone with pulse.
I bought this book. show less
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- Rating
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