Harriette Arnow

Harriette Arnow (born July 7, 1908, Bronston, Ky., U.S.—died March 22, 1986, Ann Arbor, Mich.) was an American novelist, social historian, short-story writer, and essayist, known primarily for the novel The Dollmaker (1954), the story of a Kentucky hill family that moves north to Detroit during World War II. Arnow is an important writer who is often overlooked because of her regionalist approach to universal experience.

One of six children, Arnow was born in rural Kentucky. After her sixth year her family lived primarily in the town of Burnside, although they spent some time by the Torrent, Ky., oil fields, where her father was employed. The oil fields provided a setting for Arnow’s first published short story, Marigolds and Mules (1934). This publication came after a changeful life in which Arnow managed to attend Berea College and the University of Louisville, to teach school and serve briefly as an elementary school principal, and then to move to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she was a waitress, a sales clerk, a typist, and, eventually, a writer for the Federal Writers’ Project.

Eastern Kentucky and Arnow’s teaching experience there inspired Mountain Path (1936). Although she chose stereotypical elements of mountain life—moonshining and feuding—as the dramatic environment for her first novel, her interest in the essential qualities of the people and the land outweighed a youthful affinity for melodrama. Her second novel, Between the Flowers (published posthumously in 1999), portrays a Kentucky farm family seeking to transcend the troubles brought by nature, society, and their own characters.

In Cincinnati in 1938, she met Harold Arnow, a Chicago reporter. Soon married, they bought a ramshackle farm in Kentucky. Life proved hard on a subsistence basis (their first child died in 1939), so they left for Michigan in 1945. But Arnow’s next novel, Hunter’s Horn (1949), harked back to Kentucky; nonetheless, it is far more than a regional novel. The moral danger inherent in its protagonist’s life-wasting hunt for a fox (as one critic pointed out) and the tragic vitality of his daughter, along with the masterly expression of individual character and family life, place Hunter’s Horn well beyond any description of local colour.

In 1950 the Arnows bought a 40-acre farm outside Ann Arbor, Michigan, to which they brought their two children. Four years later she published The Dollmaker. The book’s main character, Gertie Nevels, is the most celebrated of Arnow’s strong, life-giving women. Gertie’s fierce, loving bond to her children sustains the drama in the novel, which opens with her performing a roadside tracheotomy on her son. Defeated by her mother, who represents the conservative and restrictive elements of their society, Gertie gives up her plan of buying a farm and goes to join her husband, who is working in a war plant in Detroit. There the family faces slumlike conditions and confusing cultural attitudes. Eventually, however, Gertie gains the strength and knowledge to encompass her new life and its attendant tragedy (including the death of one child), in part by carving dolls that help sustain her family financially. She herself is sustained by the potentiality of a block of cherry wood, from which she hopes to carve Jesus’ face when she finds a suitable model. By the book’s end Gertie realizes that many of her neighbours might serve as a model, but in a supremely agonizing act she chops up the cherry wood to make dolls whose sale will feed her now destitute family. In 1984 The Dollmaker was made into a TV movie starring Jane Fonda.

Arnow’s other novels include The Weedkiller’s Daughter (1970), about an alienated family in a Detroit suburb, and The Kentucky Trace (1974), in which a Revolutionary War soldier seeks his family. In the early 1960s Arnow published two books of social history about the pioneers who settled the Cumberland Plateau (in Kentucky and Tennessee): Seedtime on the Cumberland (1960) and The Flowering of the Cumberland (1963).

When Arnow died, in 1984 on the Ann Arbor farm, she left behind an unpublished novel about Kentucky during the Civil War. She also left behind a body of work that bespoke the moral triumph of character over circumstance and the importance of land, or nature, in the anchoring of human worth, and that also combined dignity and realism in stressing the value of family and community. In eastern Kentucky, she was valued as well for shattering the Appalachian stereotype.

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