Harriette Louisa Simpson Arnow chronicled the people and land of rural Kentucky in both fiction and nonfiction. She spent her early years in Wayne County, Kentucky; by the time she was of school age, her family had moved to Burnside, Kentucky, living high on a hill above the Cumberland River. Her parents, Elias and Mollie Jane Denney Simpson, were both descendants of early Kentucky settlers, and Arnow was reared with a strong sense of roots and a deep appreciation for the region. Storytelling, too, was part of her early education. In a 1983 interview published in Appalachian Journal, Arnow talked about the stories she had heard as a child, adding that by the time she was five or six she was already changing the stories she did not like. An appreciation for this region and its storytelling later figured prominently in her writing.{$S[A]Simpson, H. L.;Arnow, Harriette}

The family love of stories did not extend to writing. Arnow’s plan, which also represented her parents’ wishes, was far more practical: to finish high school as quickly as possible and then to attend college for two years to prepare for a teaching career. She attended Berea College for two years, then took a position in a one-room school in a Kentucky hollow, where life was even more isolated, more rural, and more homespun than it had been in Burnside. She left this teaching post after only a year, but the people she met there inspired her to create the most compelling characters in later fiction such as Mountain Path, which was based in part on this early experience.

After this teaching experience Arnow continued her own education, this time at the University of Louisville, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 1930. Although she primarily studied math and science there, for the first time she found a group of students who were as interested in writing as she, and with them she began to practice the craft. In 1934 Arnow took a decisive step and left teaching to become a writer. She moved into a furnished room in downtown Cincinnati near the library, determined to read the great novels and to write. One year later she published two stories in small magazines, and during the winter of 1936 “The Washerwoman’s Day” appeared in The Southern Review. She published one story, “Two Hunters,” in Esquire under the pseudonym H. L. Simpson.

After she married Chicago newspaperman Harold Arnow in 1939, writing once again became relegated to stolen times. The couple moved to a farm in southern Kentucky and later, during the World War II years, to Detroit. Arnow did not publish another novel until 1949, when Hunter’s Horn appeared. That work became a best-seller and was widely acclaimed for its realism and powerful characterization. It tells the story of a Kentucky hill country farmer obsessed with an elusive red fox that is wreaking havoc on his farm.

Arnow’s third novel is generally considered her best. The Dollmaker depicts the hard struggle for economic, emotional, and artistic survival experienced by a poor white woman during war years. Gertie Nevels reluctantly leaves rural Kentucky to follow her husband to Detroit, but the move is a mistake, and Gertie yearns only to return to the rich earth and rural values she left behind. Gertie’s husband grasps at the new life, however, looking beyond the tawdry conditions of their wartime housing project to the promises of the new materialism. He buys on credit and runs the family into debt. A number of strikes and walkouts further reduce the family’s circumstances. Gertie had always enjoyed carving,...