Appalachian Figures
In Burnside, along US 27 above the Cumberland River, a metal roadside marker carries a familiar name for Wayne and Pulaski County people: Harriette Simpson Arnow, 1908-1986. The text calls her “the author of such celebrated Appalachian novels as The Dollmaker and Hunter’s Horn” and notes that she was born in Wayne County, spent most of her childhood in Burnside, and kept writing about Appalachian life even after she left Kentucky for Michigan.
For many readers that highway marker is a brief introduction to a major American writer. For historians and family researchers in south-central Kentucky it is also a sign that a remarkable archival paper trail begins here, in Monticello and Burnside, on into Pulaski County’s Keno community and out toward Detroit. Harriette Simpson Arnow did not only write about the Cumberland country. She documented it, argued with it, revisited it from city apartments and Michigan farm fields, and left a record of that lifelong conversation in novels, micro histories, letters, oral histories, and film.
This article sketches Arnow’s life with a focus on Wayne and Pulaski County, then points to the major primary source collections that preserve her voice and the voices of the people she wrote about.
Monticello birth, Burnside childhood
Harriette Louisa Simpson was born in Monticello, Wayne County, Kentucky, on 7 July 1908, the daughter of teachers Elias Thomas Simpson and Mary Jane “Mollie” Denny. She grew up just upriver in neighboring Pulaski County, in and around Burnside.
In later years she would credit her father and her maternal grandmother, Harriette Le Grand Foster Denney, as the storytellers who made her want to write. Those early stories sat alongside the realities of a small Cumberland River town in the first decades of the twentieth century: timber and river traffic, the coming of the railroad, and the long shadow of the 1950s impoundment that would eventually drown old Burnside under Lake Cumberland. Her memoir, Old Burnside: A Memoir of a Southern Girlhood, looks back on this world from the vantage point of the 1970s and remains one of the most vivid first person accounts of small town life in south-central Kentucky.
Arnow’s formal education carried her beyond the river hills, but not for long at a time. She spent two years at Berea College before transferring to the University of Louisville. After college she came straight back into the classroom as a rural teacher and principal in Pulaski County, then considered one of the more remote corners of Appalachian Kentucky.
In an April 1976 oral history interview for the Southern Oral History Program at the University of North Carolina, Arnow remembered those years in detail, talking about family life in the 1910s and 1920s, long walks to school, and the challenge of teaching in isolated communities where roads, books, and cash were all in short supply. That interview, with its mix of memory and sharp opinion, is one of the essential primary sources for her Kentucky years.
Teaching on the mountain path
Arnow’s first novel, Mountain Path, grew out of her time as a teacher in Pulaski County. Published in 1936 under the name Harriette Simpson, it follows Louisa Sheridan, a young woman who takes a job in a backcountry school and finds her idealism tested by poverty, illiteracy, and local politics.
In later interviews Arnow pushed back against the idea that Mountain Path was autobiographical in any simple way, and she complained that her New York publishers pressed her to add stereotypical Appalachian elements such as moonshining and feuds to what had begun as a quieter book of sketches. Even with those concessions, the novel is rich in what social historians value most: classroom scenes, local speech, descriptions of food and housing, the way a teacher navigates between county officials and families who are wary of outside authority.
Modern reprints emphasize that the novel is drawn directly from Arnow’s experience “as a schoolteacher in downtrodden Pulaski County, Kentucky… documenting hardships, poverty, illiteracy, and struggles” while also recording a fragile cultural richness. For researchers working on education, gender, or rural life in Depression era Kentucky, Mountain Path functions very much like a primary source, especially when read alongside her letters and oral histories.
The Keno farm, Hunter’s Horn, and the road to Detroit
In the mid 1930s Arnow left Kentucky again, this time to work for the Federal Writers’ Project of the WPA in Cincinnati, where she met her future husband, Harold B. Arnow, the son of Jewish immigrants. They married in 1939 and promptly did something that has become almost mythic in Arnow lore. They bought roughly 150 acres of rough Pulaski County hillside near Keno, hoping to live as subsistence farmers and write in their spare time.
The family website Arnow.org preserves photographs of the farm, a 1968 survey map, and even a map showing how the same land was reimagined in her 1949 novel Hunter’s Horn. Pat Arnow, her niece, recalls that the farmhouse was already in rough shape when Harriette and Harold owned it and that the couple discovered what many mountain families already knew: small scale farming on thin land was hard work that left little time or money for anything else.
Hunter’s Horn came directly out of that landscape and those years. The novel centers on Berry Worth, an obsessive fox hunter whose pursuit of one red fox gradually consumes his life. Critics have often compared Berry’s hunt to Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the white whale and have treated the book as one of the great American hunting tales. Yet the novel is just as valuable as a social portrait of a hill community in the years just before World War II: tenant arrangements, church life, women’s work, and the intricate economies of hunting, trapping, and trading that kept poor farms afloat.
Like many of their neighbors, the Arnows did not stay on the land. In the run up to the Second World War they joined the migration to industrial jobs. First they lived in the wartime housing developments around Detroit’s Willow Run bomber plant, a world we glimpse in photographs held by the University of Kentucky’s Harriette Simpson Arnow papers. Later they moved to a small farm near Ann Arbor, balancing wage work, gardening, and writing.
From those experiences came The Dollmaker, published in 1954. The novel follows Gertie Nevels and her family from a Kentucky hollow to a crowded Detroit housing project, tracing how wartime promises of steady wages collide with the dislocation, racism, and industrial regimentation of the city. Contemporary reviewers described it as one of the most powerful portraits of Appalachian migration, and Joyce Carol Oates later called it “our most unpretentious American masterpiece.”
A 1980s television adaptation starring Jane Fonda softened the novel’s ending and, as an Appalachian State University filmography notes, turned Gertie into more of a conventional victim, offering a happier conclusion than Arnow’s bleak realism. For historians that contrast is a reminder to go back to Arnow’s own text if we want to understand how she imagined the costs of leaving Kentucky and what, if anything, could be salvaged in the industrial North.
Seedtime, Flowering, and the Cumberland archive
Arnow’s most ambitious historical work began as background research for her fiction and grew into something much larger. Seedtime on the Cumberland (1960) and Flowering of the Cumberland (1963) are painstaking studies of the upper Cumberland frontier between about 1780 and 1803, focused on the Kentucky and Tennessee borderlands that shaped her family history.
These books draw on land grants, court records, travel accounts, and personal papers to reconstruct the everyday lives of hunters, farmers, enslaved people, and small town merchants. Later scholars have described them as early examples of microhistory and “history from the bottom up,” decades before those labels became fashionable.
A Nashville historical essay on French Lick, for example, notes how closely Arnow read the papers of frontier chronicler Lyman Draper and credits her for tracking Daniel Boone’s movements across the Cumberland country. When modern writers on Appalachian language or migration look back at Seedtime and Flowering, they tend to emphasize her use of original sources and the way she wove court cases and property disputes into a larger story of cultural change.
For local historians in Wayne and Pulaski County, these volumes double as a kind of family album. Surnames that still dot the phone books and cemetery stones appear in tax lists, land disputes, and militia rolls. Arnow’s own kin pass in and out of the narrative, though she treats them with the same cool eye she brings to everyone else.
Tracing Arnow in the archives
Behind those books stands a mountain of paper. The largest single collection is the Harriette Simpson Arnow papers, 1907-2004 (collection 81M2), housed in the University of Kentucky Libraries’ Special Collections Research Center in Lexington. An updated notice on the H-Net scholarly network summarized the finding aid by saying the papers “provide a broad look at a writer’s life and work, including drafts, correspondence, and materials.”
The ExploreUK catalog and associated digital exhibits show that the collection runs to more than fifty cubic feet and well over a hundred boxes of manuscripts, photographs, research files, and family documents, many supplied or described by her niece Pat Arnow. Items already digitized include a British promotional booklet for The Dollmaker, candid images of Arnow and her children at Willow Run, and pages from an article by her son Thomas about growing up with a writing mother.
For anyone trying to understand how she worked, the UK papers are indispensable. Scholars like Matt Sutton, writing about her unfinished novel Belle, have used those boxes to trace how she revised scenes, moved between fiction and history, and kept researching the Cumberland even while living in Michigan.
Arnow also appears piecemeal in other people’s collections. The James Still papers at the same UK Special Collections house a letter from her dated 4 December 1980, cataloged in Box 29, Folder 8, and indexed in the James Still Correspondence Database. Still, a fellow Kentucky author best known for River of Earth, was part of the same mid twentieth century Appalachian literary network that included Arnow, Jesse Stuart, and others. Their surviving correspondence helps map that network and shows the practical side of publishing, grants, and college visits.
Western Kentucky University’s Manuscripts and Folklife Archives in Bowling Green hold a single but revealing letter from Arnow, dated 6 March 1964, written from Ann Arbor to a Mrs Holland. The finding aid (SC 2936) notes that Arnow thanks her correspondent for kind words about Hunter’s Horn, complains about the lukewarm reception her books often received in Kentucky, and points her toward an extended profile in the Louisville Courier Journal Magazine. That short bit of correspondence confirms what her son and biographers have said elsewhere, that Arnow never stopped thinking of herself as a Kentucky writer, even when the reviews were cooler at home than in New York.
Beyond Kentucky, Arnow shows up in the Granville Hicks Papers at Syracuse University, a seventy five foot collection of the Marxist turned anti Marxist critic and Macmillan editor. The finding aid notes correspondence with Harriette Arnow spanning roughly 1929 to 1980. Those letters capture her conversations with a politically engaged critic about war, class, and the business of publishing, and they remind us that Detroit and New York editors were just as important to her career as hometown readers.
The Southern Appalachian Writers Collection at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, housed in the D. Hiden Ramsey Library, also maintains a Harriette Arnow file with manuscripts and related materials. The collection’s online guide is linked directly from the main reference article on Arnow.
Berea College’s Hutchins Library, in nearby Madison County, preserves a different sort of primary source: a set of speeches and programs from an “Authors Night” event in August 1955 where Charles Noble Shutt celebrated both Jesse Stuart and Harriette Arnow as regional authors worth reading. Together these scattered pieces show how she moved through overlapping circles of Kentucky teachers, librarians, and writers even as her reputation grew nationally.
Listening to Arnow in her own voice
The richest primary sources for Arnow’s personality are the recorded interviews and film that capture her accent, humor, and sharp opinions about feminism, class, and the uses of history.
The April 1976 interview with the Southern Oral History Program at UNC, mentioned earlier, is available online with both audio and a full transcript. Its catalog description notes that she talks at length about growing up in Kentucky during the 1910s and 1920s, teaching school, setting goals as a writer, and thinking through marriage and family roles. Historians of education and gender in Appalachia have leaned heavily on this oral history, which appears in reference lists under the title “A southern woman’s view on the disjoint between feminism and individualism.”
Six years later, in 1982, the journal MELUS (Multi Ethnic Literature of the United States) published “A MELUS Interview: Harriette Arnow,” a lengthy question and answer piece conducted by Danny Miller of the University of Cincinnati. There she and her husband Harold talked with unusual frankness about their Cincinnati WPA years, the Keno farm experiment, and their experiences in Detroit war housing, as well as about class, ethnicity, and the ways reviewers tried to fit her books into fashionable categories. The article is still a standard citation in critical work on The Dollmaker and Hunter’s Horn.
Not long before her death, Arnow also sat for a filmed interview with Appalshop documentary maker Herb E. Smith. The resulting short documentary, Harriette Simpson Arnow, 1908-1986, was produced in 1987. It is now available via Morehead State University’s Appalachian Kentucky Video Archives and is regularly assigned in literature and Appalachian studies courses. A teacher’s guide prepared for the film describes its subject as “a feisty, funny, outspoken, talented and hardworking woman,” emphasizing that in these interviews she provides both basic biographical details and her own commentary on writing and place.
Finally, Kentucky Educational Television’s Living by Words: A Celebration of Kentucky Writing, a 2003 documentary developed with help from writer Gurney Norman, includes segments and teaching resources on Arnow and other major Kentucky authors whose work is tied to the University of Kentucky and the King Library. For classroom teachers in Kentucky, Living by Words and the Appalshop film often serve as the most accessible gateways to introducing students to Arnow’s books.
Local memory and regional legacy
Commemoration of Arnow is not limited to academic collections and film archives. Alongside the Pulaski County highway marker and an interpretive panel at Old Burnside, local institutions have woven her into their own public history.
Somerset Community College, located just up the road on Monticello Street, hosts an annual Arnow Conference for the Humanities that “pays tribute to the literary contributions of the late Harriette Simpson Arnow, born in Wayne County and [who] grew up in Pulaski County.” Conference announcements emphasize that her “award-winning fiction and nonfiction work focuses on the rural Kentuckians she knew best,” and they pair papers on Arnow with broader explorations of Appalachian history and culture.
Back at the Keno farm, the land that once supported the Arnows’ short lived subsistence experiment has grown up into forest and is now protected under a federal conservation program. A 2022 essay by Pat Arnow reflects on how the collapsed farmhouse and rewilded fields testify both to the difficulty of making a living on such land and to the power of the place that nourished Hunter’s Horn.
When we put the roadside signs, the farm, the conference, and the archival collections together, a picture emerges of an author who never stopped being, in some sense, a Wayne County and Pulaski County writer. She knew Cincinnati and Detroit as well as anyone, and she could argue theory with Marxist critics and feminist scholars, but she kept returning in her fiction and non fiction to the Cumberland country that shaped her family and her imagination.
For readers of AppalachianHistorian.org, Arnow’s life offers two overlapping invitations. One is simply to read or reread her books as portraits of mountain communities, migrant families, and frontier settlers whose names still echo in county records. The other is to follow her into the archives she loved, where court minutes, land plats, and old letters open up the kind of deep local history she spent a lifetime writing.
Sources & further reading
Oral History Interview with Harriette Arnow, April 1976, Interview G-0006, Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007), University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South+1
Harriette Simpson Arnow papers, 1907-2004 (Collection 81M2), Special Collections Research Center, Margaret I. King Library, University of Kentucky Libraries, Lexington. H-Net Networks+2University of Kentucky Libraries+2
James Still papers, 1885-2007, especially correspondence with Harriette Arnow (entry for 4 December 1980, 87M12: Box 29, Folder 8), Special Collections Research Center, University of Kentucky Libraries. Stillbib
SC 2936, Harriette Louisa (Simpson) Arnow letter, 6 March 1964, Manuscripts & Folklife Archives, Western Kentucky University.
Harriette Simpson Arnow, 1908-1986, documentary film directed by Herb E. Smith, Appalshop (1987), streaming via Appalachian Kentucky Video Archives, Morehead State University. Morehead State University+2Morehead State University+2
“A MELUS Interview: Harriette Arnow,” interview by Danny Miller, MELUS 9, no. 2 (Summer 1982): 83-97. JSTOR+2OUP Academic+2
Harriette Simpson Arnow, Old Burnside: A Memoir of a Southern Girlhood (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1977). Wikipedia
Harriette Simpson Arnow, Seedtime on the Cumberland (1960) and Flowering of the Cumberland (1963). Wikipedia+1
Harriette Simpson, Mountain Path (1936; various later reprints). ERIC
Harriette Arnow, Hunter’s Horn (1949) and The Dollmaker (1954). Wikipedia+1
Arnow family website, Arnow farm in Keno, Pulaski County, Kentucky, including photographs, 1968 survey map, and fictionalized map for Hunter’s Horn. Pat Arnow+2Pat Arnow+2
“Harriette Simpson Arnow,” ExploreKYHistory marker entry and related highway marker documentation via the Kentucky Historical Society. Explore Kentucky History+2Kentucky Historical Society+2
Martha Billips, “Harriet Simpson Arnow (1908-1986): A Writer’s Life,” in Kentucky Women: Their Lives and Times (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2015). Dokumen+1
Glenda Hobbs, “Arnow, Harriette (Louisa) Simpson,” in Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia, via Encyclopedia.com. Encyclopedia
Haeja K. Chung, ed., Harriette Simpson Arnow: Critical Essays on Her Work (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1995). JSTOR+1
Susan Lefler, “Harriette Arnow,” Smoky Mountain Living (1 September 2008).
Somerset Community College, Arnow Conference for the Humanities and related news releases on the conference and associated exhibits. SCC+2SCC+2
“Harriette Simpson Arnow,” main reference article with external links to UNC Asheville’s Southern Appalachian Writers Collection and to the UK SCRC finding aid. Wikipedia