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(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.

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).

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+.

from Chapter 21

By December, Milly was slow in all her movements, her days long reaches of time that somehow must be got through, with work done in spite of backache and toothache, puffed feet and hands, and the bigness of her body that seemed to hinder her in all things, be it sweeping under the stove or squatting to milk Betsey. But no matter how slowly she might walk to the spring or the milking or on other outdoor errands, the pups followed at her heels, matching their swift pace to her slow one, sometimes running round and round her, but never leaping on her as from sheer exuberance they sometimes jumped on Nunn and the children. And she would smile on them and know they understood how things were with her better than any of her human family; and with her own feet slow and heavy, she would joy in their swiftness, think how good it was that something on this earth could run light-footed and free, running freest and fastest and gayest when it did what God had meant it to do—hunt.

She wished she could be certain that catching King Devil was God's will for Nunn; more and more as he hunted alone through the fall it seemed as if he went against all things: his own body that needed sleep, the weather, the opinion of the neighbors, and God's will. Often in the black time before dawn, when he was not yet home, she would sit shivering by the fire, or move from first one window to the other, listening, staring out into the dark or the cloudy moonlight. Suse would awaken and come to her and say, “Your back hurten you bad, Mom? Could I rub it?”

She would shake her head and tell Suse to go back to bed, but Suse would linger with her by the fire, studying her sometimes with big sorrowful eyes, full of a pity and an understanding that Milly would as lief not have had from her own child. Suse knew it wasn't her back that drove her to walk the floor in misery.

All the warnings and portents of the year would come back into her mind: in October a bird flew into an upstairs room, and a bird in the house was a certain sign of death; last fall, in potato-digging time, Lee Roy had brought a hoe into the house, and that was a sign of trouble; the last two new moons she had first seen barred by the leafless branches of the walnut tree; Deb's tizic tree had done but poorly in the hot dry summer, and now he was taller than the measure of his head last year—that could mean he was going to die, outgrowing his tree like that; worse than anything was the memory of Sue Annie's face, witchlike and full of mysteries, as she nodded her white-turbaned head and declared that King Devil would never be taken until he had had man blood; oh, he wouldn't kill the man himself; he'd never killed a hound, but many was the one he'd led to its death, and he'd never be satisfied till he had led a man to his death.

And Milly, remembering, would shiver and think of all the ways a man could die: pneumonia fever in the cold damp weather, the cliffs where a man numb with cold or not too wide-awake could, with one false step in the dark, kill himself. On and on her mind would go, until all the future was a black burden in her heart and on her head.

And Suse would watch her mother and envy Lureenie, who was going to a place where men never hunted and women had doctors in childbirth.

But it was near mid-December before Lureenie came running home from the mail, laughing and chattering, her arms spilling packages and a letter from [her husband] Rans clutched in one hand. “I can go now,” she cried, and her voice was thin and breaking, as if she were ready to cry. “Rans sent me a money order big enough to come on, an the youngens' coats has come.”

She was suddenly silent, looking around the kitchen, the Montgomery Ward package forgotten in her arms; her glance wandered through the window to the hills across the creek, their pine- and cedar-covered slopes gray-black in the dusk. She drew a long sigh and said with a slow shake of her head, “It's th onliest thing I've ever wanted that's come to pass—gitten away. I cain't believe it yit. Its like I was dreamen that in two, three days I'll be in a place where I can see people, hear em talk; th nights won't be so still—I hate th pines at dusty dark an on windy nights, an I'm sick a th hills around th house, shutten out th sun—an all th light I want at night—it's so dark in that house, an so still since—”

She stopped, ashamed even now to give herself away, as if she knew that Milly and others of the neighbor women had pitied her, off by herself like that, with no man person on the long dark nights of the fall.

Suse, too, looked out the window at the hillside; she liked to look at the hill; like the rest of the woods, it was for her full of more change and excitement than any other part of her life; it was fun in spring to leave the corn planting and hunt flowers in the woods or wild greens by the river, and the long grape hunts in the fall—a sudden and unreasoning fear of the future filled her for an instant with a painful doubt.

It was hard enough to be a girl child shut off from the world. How would it be to be a woman like Lureenie, married with little youngens, but wanting still the outside world, tied down to a house and youngens, with one baby in your arms and another big in your belly like Milly—and always the knowing that you could never get away until you were dead?

She shrugged her shoulders and smiled at the hill as the strong smile at the threats of the weak; she wouldn't be like Milly and she wouldn't be like Lureenie; she'd make her own life; it wouldn't make her.

Times and places were mingled in my head; the past was part of the present, close as the red cedar water bucket in the kitchen, or the big cherry press put together with pegs, or the parched corn a grandmother now and then made for us. This was the same as the parched corn from the old days, or the cornmeal mush we sometimes ate, no different at all from the mush in the stories. An old shirt in a trunk upstairs, square-armholed, stitched by hand, of cotton grown and woven and spun on the Big South Fork of the Cumberland, could have been the same as that worn by some old granpa with many greats before his name. My people loved the past more than their present lives, I think, but it cannot be said we lived in the past. Two things tied all time together; these had run through most of the old stories to shape the lives of men, and so did they shape our lives and the lives of the people about us. These were the land and the Cumberland.

There was at the head of our stairs a window; and always at night, no matter what the weather, I pulled the curtain; and if I carried a lamp, I pushed my face close against the glass to shut out the light in order the better to see. Many times during the day just passed I would have seen the same thing, but still I looked. Our house rose gaunt and white and high on the western side of a hill above the Cumberland; east were the hills and from our eastern windows we could see nothing save our own hill rising, but west past the river lay a wide sweep of hilly to gently rolling country. The Highland Rim it is called in Tennessee, Pennyrile in Kentucky, and a kind of no man's land between the Bluegrass and the Cumberland Plateau or hills.

Living so at the meeting place of Highland Rim and hill was like having a prize seat in some vast amphitheatre. We could, on fair days or on the white moonlit nights of winter, see for miles and miles across the old high valley of the Cumberland, and past this rows of low hills until earth and sky met in a dark nothingness. Northward we could see at night the lights from the county seat town of Somerset; nearby was Ferguson with its railroad shops and roundhouse where the big double headers were hooked up for the long pull over the mountains and into Tennessee. South and west all set about in the dark, so dim at times there was wonder if it be light or low star, were the lighted windows of farm homes, many at that time yellow-gleaming from coal oil lamps, for electric lights like many other things, including roads, were slow in coming to our part of the country.

Closer, were the brighter lights of Burnside that, after pausing on a narrow bench of level land at the point where the Big South Fork met the Cumberland, rose step-like over limestone bluffs and ledges to a hilly bench of higher land where the churches, the school and most of the homes, all painted white, were gathered. Even in its boom days during my early childhood when all the business life of the town was gathered in the lowland by the river, the place had hardly more than a thousand people; but in it were five churches, five lumber mills, several stores, a Masonic Temple, the brick building housing both elementary and high schools, a bank, and a frame hotel with more than seven gables.

I remember the mules pulling the heavily loaded wagons up from the ferry or the steamboat landing. I remember the stagecoach that ran between Burnside and Monticello until 1915; and all about me were people like my grandmothers and Cousin Dora Taylor who remembered well the days before the coming of the railroad in ‘78 when the Cumberland was the only highway, and most things from pianos to candy came from Nashville.

There was a varied life in the town, though many now would make of us all one, for all of us were native born, white, and Protestant when we got religion. I do recall that once I heard talk of a foreigner. He dealt in meat, and his speech was strange; worse, nobody had so much as seen his father, or even knew where he had been born—Cincinnati some said. In any case he was not one of our people. There were others not of us exactly—some of the mill owners and managers, but they had been there many years; every one knew from where they came and they had relatives.

The scarcity of nearby relatives troubled me at times as a child, and often I felt a stranger there, though I can recall no one unknown to me as I went about the innumerable family errands. There was in the town a good handful of people, including teachers in school and Sunday school, to be cousined. Still, we were strangers; many of our classmates such as the Newells and the Richardsons lived on land heired down from first settlers who had come at the close of the Revolution.

I could not from the window see even the lights of our country—a part of the adjoining county of Wayne, hidden behind hills to the south; for we were hill people. I had been born there, the fifth of most of my generations, and it was from Wayne that most of the stories came. No horses of my childhood could ever be so fine as the five-gaited saddle horses that took prizes at the Wayne County Fair, nor mules so strong and sleek and black and big, hickories so straight and tall, nor Teachers' Institutes so filled with romance and leg o' mutton sleeves. I knew the big hickories were gone like the chestnut oak, skinned for its tanbark and left to die; the big chestnuts were dying with blight, oxen were seldom seen, metheglin never brewed at all any more, and most of our kin were gone away.

Still, it was there, a place in the geography of time, built on the same things that shaped our lives—the land and the river. Everybody owned at least a little land, and the expression “land poor” was common. Many families of the town had at least a vegetable garden and a family cow, daily twice-driven to and from some pasture field nearby. “He comes of good farming stock,” was enough said of the birthright of a man, and earthly dreams were not of mink coats and Cadillacs or of vice-presidencies in great industrial establishments, but to own a good farm with a big stretch of bottom land and a fair boundary of timber.