HARRIETTE SIMPSON ARNOW

(July 7, 1908–March 22, 1986)

Harriette Simpson Arnow, the second oldest child of six, grew up in the south-central Kentucky town of Burnside, located on the South Fork of the Cumberland River. Her mother, Molly Denney Simpson, and her father, Elias Simpson, had both been schoolteachers before their marriage, and her mother wanted her daughters also to become teachers.

After graduating from Burnside High School in 1924, Arnow attended Berea College in Kentucky (1924–26) and earned her teaching certificate. She then began a job as the teacher of a one-room school in Pulaski County, Kentucky. While there, she took a correspondence course, the only creative writing class she ever had. From childhood, Arnow wanted to be a writer.

When she had enough money to return to school, she enrolled in the University of Louisville and soon graduated with a B.S. in education. She taught again near her hometown and in Louisville before abandoning the profession, declaring that she would “rather starve as a writer than as a teacher.”

In 1934, she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she worked a number of “day jobs”—waitress, typist, and clerk—that allowed her to devote much of her time to writing. Her first short stories and her first novel, Mountain Path, were published to favorable reviews. While working on a Works Progress Administration (WPA) historical guidebook, she met Harold Arnow, a Chicago journalist whom she married in 1939.

The couple shared a dream of owning a farm and bought land in Keno, Kentucky, where they lived from 1939 to 1944. Three of their four children were born there, although a son and daughter died as infants.

Arnow continued to write, and the family moved to Detroit's wartime housing in 1944. As she completed Hunter's Horn, her life in Detroit offered ideas for her classic novel of the Appalachian migration experience, The Dollmaker. After World War II, the Arnows bought a home in Ann Arbor, where they lived for the rest of their lives.

Her second and third novels were best-sellers; each was nominated for the National Book Award. She received awards for her fiction and nonfiction from the Friends of American Writers (1955) and the American Association for State and Local History (1961), as well as honorary degrees from Albion College (Michigan, 1955), Transylvania University (Kentucky, 1979), and the University of Kentucky (1981). The Margaret King Library of the University of Kentucky preserves her manuscripts and papers in its Arnow Special Collection.

Arnow's fiction treats mountain people with notable authenticity, creating particularly complex and resilient characters. The excerpt from chapter 21 of Hunter's Horn focuses on Milly Ballew, pregnant for the eighth time and worried about her children and her husband, Nunn, a foxhunter obsessed with catching an elusive, destructive fox he's named King Devil. Their daughter, Suse, and neighbor, Lureenie, long to leave the Kentucky hills.

The excerpt from Arnow's social history book, Seedtime on the Cumberland, reveals her fascination and personal connections with Appalachian history.

The short story “The First Ride” takes the reader along in a pregnant woman's fevered dream.

OTHER SOURCES TO EXPLORE

PRIMARY

Novels: Between the Flowers (1999), The Kentucky Trace (1974), Weedkiller's Daughter (1970), The Dollmaker (1954), Hunter's Horn (1949), Mountain Path (1936). Nonfiction: Old Burnside (1977), Flowering of the Cumberland (1963), Seedtime on the Cumberland (1960).

SECONDARY

Haeja K. Chung, ed. Harriette Simpson Arnow: Critical Essays on Her Work (1995). Wilton Eckley, Harriette Arnow (1974). Glenda Hobbs, “Harriette Simpson Arnow,” American Novelists Since World War II: Dictionary of Literary Biography (1980), Vol. 6, ed. James?. Kibler, Jr. 3–8. Alex Kotlowitz, “At 75, Full Speed Ahead,” Detroit News (4 December 1983), 14+.