Picture of author.

Harriette Arnow (1908–1986)

Forfatter af The Dollmaker

15+ Works 1,059 Members 25 Reviews 1 Favorited

Om forfatteren

Image credit: New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction Number LC-USZ62-117675

Serier

Værker af Harriette Arnow

The Dollmaker (1954) 748 eksemplarer
Seedtime on the Cumberland (1960) 77 eksemplarer
Flowering of the Cumberland (1963) 70 eksemplarer
Hunter's Horn (1949) 68 eksemplarer
The Weedkiller's Daughter (1969) 19 eksemplarer
Old Burnside (1977) 17 eksemplarer
Between the Flowers: A Novel (1999) 13 eksemplarer
Mountain Path (1985) 11 eksemplarer
Nukentekijä. Osa 1 2 eksemplarer
Nukentekijä. Osa 2 2 eksemplarer
Le couteau 1 eksemplar

Associated Works

Satte nøgleord på

Almen Viden

Juridisk navn
Arnow, Harriette Simpson
Fødselsdato
1908-07-07
Dødsdag
1986-03-22
Køn
female
Nationalitet
USA
Fødested
Monticello, Wayne County, Kentucky, USA
Dødssted
Washtenaw County, Michigan, USA
Bopæl
Burnside, Kentucky, USA
Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Detroit, Michigan, USA
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA
Uddannelse
University of Louisville
Berea College
Erhverv
teacher
novelist
short story writer
Organisationer
Federal Writers' Project
Priser og hædersbevisninger
Weatherford Award (Special, 1978)
Kort biografi
Harriette Louisa Simpson Arnow was born and raised in Kentucky. She began writing as a young girl. She spent two years at Berea College, then transferred to the University of Louisville, where she graduated in 1931. After teaching in rural Appalachia for two years, she moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she worked for the Federal Writers' Project of the WPA. Her first short stories were published in Esquire Magazine under the name H.L. Simpson. Her first novel, Mountain Path, appeared in 1936. In 1939, she married Harold B. Arnow and the couple later moved to Detroit, the setting for her best-known work, The Dollmaker (1954). During her career, she produced five novels, two nonfiction books, a short autobiography, and about 30 short stories, essays, and book reviews.

Medlemmer

Anmeldelser

The Dollmaker is the story of Gertie Nevels, a Kentucky woman who is uprooted from the home that she loves and forced to live in Detroit during the Second World War. It is a tragedy that springs from the loss of agrarian life to industrial labor, the misunderstands and lack of communications between spouses, and the burying of the artistic spirit and individuality beneath the struggle to simply exist.

There are dozens of ideas in this book that could be discussed and debated at length, but what kept coming to the fore for me was the way one life, one person, can be smothered in the crowd of humanity, and how much humanity itself suffers for this every time it happens. Life in Detroit is a nightmare for Gertie, but not only for Gertie; the alley she lives in is peopled with lives being beaten down and wasted. The factions that divide these people are much less obvious to the reader than the squalid ties that bind them. The contrast between the deprivations of the farm life that begins the novel and the deprivations of the life Gertie finds in Detroit are stark, and while Kentucky is not paradise, it would appear to be when weighed against Detroit.

There is also the religious element that runs through the book: “Religious” in the broadest sense of the word. For Gertie is searching for God, for Christ, and even for Judas. She looks to understand her fate and whether her choices are truly her own or ordained by some higher power. Indeed, there are times when I wondered where God is in the lives of so many helpless and vulnerable people. As is usually the case, the people who most profess to speak in His name are the least like Him.

My heart was broken so many times during the reading of this novel that it felt sometimes as if there were an iron band squeezing it. It is in excess of 600 pages and I strongly feel that not a word is wasted. Right into the Favorites folder with this one, with my only complaint being that the print in the version I was reading was insufferably small for these old eyes. I suppose I will need to be on the lookout for a copy with larger print, since I can easily see the need to read it again someday.


… (mere)
 
Markeret
mattorsara | 21 andre anmeldelser | Aug 11, 2022 |
This novel was grim and depressing, but also hauntingly lovely. It is a close look into the lives of those who moved to Detroit during WWII to be part of the war effort, and how it affected them after the war was over and the jobs went away. A heavy read, but one that will likely stay with the reader years after it has been read.
 
Markeret
bookwyrmqueen | 21 andre anmeldelser | Oct 25, 2021 |
I got yer Great American Novel right here.

In the years just prior to American entry into World War II, Nunn Ballew is raising his family, trying to restore the family land that he bought back with money earned in the mines, and hunting an especially pernicious red fox, known as King Devil, who has been plaguing the district and killing far too much livestock since Ballew's return five years earlier. Nunn is obsessed with King Devil, and during fox season, it's a major distraction from needed farm work, which he knows is vital to his long-term plans.

But this isn't just Nunn's story. It is every bit as much the story of his wife Milly, his daughter Suse, the local midwife Sue Annie, and an interconnected web of extended family and neighbors in the area of Little Smoky Creek, Kentucky.

The lives of the Kentucky hill people are hard, and they're just coming out of the Great Depression and into the beginnings of the Second World War. Some of the men are working for the WPA; others, like Nunn, are cautiously exploring the benefits of working with the AAA and county agricultural agents. And they're running their foxhounds most nights during fox season, trying to get King Devil.

Meanwhile, for all that the men are juggling, the women's lives are harder. Food grown needs to be canned, smoked, ground, baked, processed somehow to last from harvest to the next growing season. Nunn's decision to buy two purebred foxhounds means selling what would have been their winter meat that year. Improvements to the farm mean no money for Sunday shoes or the bus to high school in town for Suse. Milly and Suse and the oldest boy, Lee Roy, work hard to make ends meet and fill in the gaps Nunn leaves when he's running his hounds, but often see themselves going without things that make them feel exposed before other wives and older children among the neighbors.

And it's Sue Annie and Milly who labor long, hard, and heartbreakingly to save a neighbor's youngest child, while haunted by memories of their own lost children.

This is an intimate and moving look at life among the hill people. It's an older time and a different place than most of us know. The lower status and hard conditions for women are accepted by all as the natural order, and Arnow doesn't regard it as alien, but she also show the ways in which the women are the strength and necessary binding of the families and the whole community. Nunn seems to have a suspicion, a hope, that his daughter can do something more, if he can find the means to let her. He seems to be catching wind of how the changes disrupting their community can bring good as well as ill--but it's a hard, challenging time, and nothing comes easily.

There's some emotionally rough stuff here, and it's not a cheerful, chirpy, happily-eve-after ending. Neither is it grim and hopeless and negative for everyone.

This is a rich, strong, narrative about a piece of American life and culture that rarely gets respect or understanding.

Recommended for everyone with pulse.

I bought this book.
… (mere)
 
Markeret
LisCarey | Sep 19, 2018 |
I read this book years ago on the advice of a friend from Eastern Kentucky. I still think about it...an amazing American story rich with the trials of strong people living difficult lives with great dignity.
 
Markeret
ioplibrarian | 21 andre anmeldelser | Aug 26, 2018 |

Lister

Hæderspriser

Måske også interessante?

Associated Authors

Statistikker

Værker
15
Also by
3
Medlemmer
1,059
Popularitet
#24,318
Vurdering
4.0
Anmeldelser
25
ISBN
58
Sprog
2
Udvalgt
1

Diagrammer og grafer