Harriette Simpson Arnow

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Harriette Arnow (July 7, 1908 - March 22, 1986) was a novelist, claimed by both Kentucky and Michigan as a native daughter. Arnow has been called an expert on the people of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, but she herself was never a simple hill woman. She loved cities and spent crucial periods of her life in Cincinnati, Ohio and Detroit, Michigan.

She was born Harriette Simpson in Wayne County, Kentucky and grew up in neighboring Pulaski County. Her father, a former teacher, worked in factories and oil fields, and her mother, also a former teacher, raised her to be a teacher, too. From a girlhood spent in the bustling river town of Burnside, Arnow wanted to write and also to develop her knowledge of the land and geology. She attended Berea College for two years before transferring to the University of Louisville. She worked for two years as a teacher in rural Pulaski County, then one of the wilder parts of a region on the outskirts of Appalachia, before moving to Cincinnati, where she published her first works in 1935, two short stories — "A Mess of Pork" and "Marigolds and Mules" — under the pseudonym H.L. Simpson along with a photo of her brother-in-law to disguise her gender from the editors of Esquire.

In 1936 she published her first novel, Mountain Path, basing it on her experiences as a teacher. Under the instructions of her publisher, Arnow added sensational "Appalachian" stereotypical elements (moonshining, feuds) to her original work, a much more sedate series of sketches.

She married Harold B. Arnow, the son of Jewish immigrants in 1939. They lived briefly in Pulaski County, Arnow again working as a teacher, before settling in public housing in Detroit, Michigan in 1944. Her 1949 novel Hunter's Horn was a best seller and received considerable critical acclaim, finishing close to William Faulkner's A Fable in that year's voting for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1950 she moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan. She published her most famous work The Dollmaker in 1954. This novel about a poor Kentucky family forced by economic necessity to move to Detroit reflected her own life, though it was by no means an autobiographical portrait of the educated, sophisticated Arnow. More pertinently, the novel reflects the experiences of many Kentuckians and other Appalachians who migrated from their beloved homes for the promise of better lives in the industrialized North. Later works included the historical studies Seedtime on the Cumberland and Flowering of the Cumberland. Her last books were the novels The Weedkiller's Daughter, 1970, The Kentucky Trace, 1974, and the memoir Old Burnside, 1977. She died in 1986. Michigan State University Press brought out her previously unpublished second novel Between the Flowers in 1999 and The Collected Short Stories of Harriette Simpson Arnow in 2005.