Harriette Simpson Arnow

Claimed by both Kentucky and Michigan as a native daughter, novelist Harriette Arnow was born Harriette Simpson in Wayne County, Kentucky in 1908. Arnow has been called an expert on the people of the Southern Appalachian mountains, but she herself was never a simple hill woman. Her father worked in factories, and her mother, a former teacher, raised her to be a teacher too. From girlhood, Arnow wanted to write. She attended Berea College, became a teacher, and then in 1936 published her first novel, Mountain Path. She loved cities and spent crucial periods of her life in Cincinnati and Detroit. She married Harold B. Arnow, the son of Jewish immigrants,in 1939. Her 1949 novel Hunter's Horn was a best seller, and she published her most famous work The Dollmaker in 1954. This novel was about a poor Kentucky family forced by economic necessity to move to Detroit. Later works included the historical studies Seedtime on the Cumberland and Flowering of the Cumberland. Her last novels were The Weedkiller's Daughter, 1970, The Kentucky Trace, 1974, and Old Burnside, 1977. She died in 1986. Michigan State University Press brought out her previously unpublished second novel Between the Flowersin 1999.

For more information, see the article at http://athena.english.vt.edu/~appalach/writersA/arnow.html.