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Harriette Simpson Arnow

 

  • Born: July 7, 1908
  • Birthplace: Wayne County, KY
  • Died: 1986

Harriet Arnow was born Harriet Louisa Simpson in Kentucky. She was an avid reader, and began writing poems and short stories when she was a young girl. Even with her love of English and reading, she decided to major in science in college, though she continued to write, and was a member of a literary society. She taught for a short while after graduating from college, but decided to concentrate on her writing, and moved to Ohio.

Her first novel, Mountain Path, was published in 1936, and was highly successful. Her next novel, Hunter's Horn, came 15 years later. It was a 1949 best seller, and a Fiction Book Club selection. In 1954, she published her most impressive work, The Dollmaker. It remained on the best-seller list for 31 weeks and also placed second in the National Book Awards and won the Friends of American Writers award the next year. Other awards Arnow won include the Weathorford award which is "given for writings that further an understanding of Appalachia" and also the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Midwestern Literature from Michigan State University. She was married to Harold B. Arnow in 1939, and they had two children.

Most Famous Works

  • Mountain Path (1936)
  • Hunter's Horn (1949)
  • The Dollmaker (1954)
  • Seedtime on the Cumberland
  • Flowering on the Cumberland
  • The Weedkiller's Daughter (1970)
  • The Kentucky Trace (1974)
  • Old Burnside (1977)
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Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature:

Works by Harriette Arnow

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(1908-1986)

1954The Dollmaker. Its title having been changed by the publisher from Dissolution, the third installment of Arnow's Kentucky trilogy (preceded by Mountain Path, 1936, and Hunter's Horn, 1949), is a bestseller and generally considered her greatest achievement. In what Joyce Carol Oates calls "our most unpretentious masterpiece," Arnow follows the career of an Appalachian woman who, as part of the great migration northward, tries but fails to transplant her talents and values to the inhospitable landscape of Detroit. The novel is edged out by William Faulkner's A Fable for the Pulitzer Prize.


(1908–1986), novelist and social historian. Arnow is chiefly known for her novels portraying the poor whites of Appalachia and is considered a writer of the Southern Renaissance. Born Harriette Louisa Simpson in Wayne County, Kentucky, Arnow found in this region of her youth the subject matter for much of her literary work. Groomed by her parents to be an educator, Arnow nevertheless felt a calling to write. Upon completing two years' instruction at Berea College, she began teaching in an impoverished area near her childhood home, a locale she would later re-create in her first novel, Mountain Path (1936). After two years of teaching, Arnow decided to finish her bachelor's degree at the University of Louisville. She taught again after graduation in 1930, but soon moved to the Midwest to pursue her dream of writing. In Cincinnati, she finished Mountain Path and met Harold Arnow, a journalist, whom she married in 1939 in Kentucky. The Arnows lived there briefly but soon moved to Michigan, settling first in Detroit and then in Ann Arbor, where Arnow wrote Hunter's Horn (1949), also set in Kentucky. Her next and most successful novel was The Dollmaker (1954), the story of a Kentucky wife transplanted with her family to Detroit, where her husband is employed. A best-seller, The Dollmaker was beaten out for the 1955 National Book Award by William Faulkner's A Fable. Arnow's social histories, Seedtime on the Cumberland (1962) and Flowering of the Cumberland (1963), describe the beginnings of the Appalachian region of her youth through its pioneer days. Her next novel, The Weedkiller's Daughter (1970), is again set in Detroit, but this time centers around a city girl. Arnow completed one more novel, The Kentucky Trace (1974), and another Kentucky history, Old Burnside (1977), before her death in 1986. Arnow's ability to tell a fine story is enough to make her works highly readable. More significant, though, is her fiction's ability to present the truth about a region and its people. From her first novel on, her literary goal is not the romantic sentimentalism of the regionalists and local colorists, but the realistic depiction of human beings as individuals, rather than stereotypes. Her work in no way takes part in the “hillbilly” characterization of the people of her homeland; what Arnow's work accomplishes is the honest portrayal of a people in the midst of debilitating socioeconomic circumstances.

Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Harriette Simpson Arnow

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Harriette Arnow (July 7, 1908 – March 22, 1986) was an American novelist, who lived in Kentucky and Michigan. Arnow has been called an expert on the people of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, but she herself loved cities and spent crucial periods of her life in Cincinnati, and Detroit.

Contents

Early life and education

She was born as Harriette Louisa Simpson in Monticello,[1]Wayne County, Kentucky, and grew up in neighboring Pulaski County. Born one of six siblings to a family that traced its heritage to the Revolutionary War era,[2] both parents were teachers and she was raised to be a teacher. Arnow wanted to write and 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 more remote areas of Appalachia, before moving to Cincinnati, where in 1935 she published her first works in Esquire, two short stories—"A Mess of Pork" and "Marigolds and Mules". She used the pseudonym H.L. Simpson and sent a photo of her brother-in-law to disguise her gender.

Career as writer

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.

From 1934-1939 she lived in Cincinnati and worked for the Federal Writer's Project of the WPA where she met her future husband, Harold B. Arnow,[3] the son of Jewish immigrants, in 1939. They lived briefly in Pulaski County, Harriette again working as a teacher, before settling in a public housing complex in Detroit, Michigan in 1944. Her 1949 novel, Hunter's Horn,[4] 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 they 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, but also reflects the experiences of many Appalachians who migrated from their homes for the promise of better lives in the industrialized North. Told through the eyes of Gertie Nevels, a woman torn from the woods and farmland to move with her children to join her husband living in WWII factory workers' housing in Detroit, it can be seen as a work of feminist fiction. Arnow herself disputed this characterization however, preferring to see it as an individual woman's struggle to survive in a harsh and changing world [5]

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, aged 77, at her farm in Washtenaw County, Michigan.[6] 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.

References

  1. ^ www.britannica.com
  2. ^ Oral history with Harriett Arnow April 1976 in Documentint the American South http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/G-0006/menu.html
  3. ^ Chung, Haeja K. (ed) Hariette Simpson Anow: Critical Essays on Her Work. Michigan State University Press.
  4. ^ Oral History with Harriett Arnow April 1976
  5. ^ "A southern woman's view on the disjoint between feminism and individualism " in Oral Histories of the American South.
  6. ^ "Harriette Arnow Dies at 78; Author of 'The Dollmaker'". The New York Times. March 25, 1986. http://www.nytimes.com/1986/03/25/obituaries/harriette-arnow-dies-at-78-author-of-the-dollmaker.html. Retrieved May 24, 2010. 

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Houghton Mifflin Chronology of US Literature. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
 Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the US. The Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States. © 1995 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia on Answers.com. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Harriette Simpson Arnow Read more

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