Harriette Louisa Simpson Arnow – Bickerstaff Booksellers

The Dollmaker

Kim — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:12:58 +0000

Gertie Nevels and her husband Clovis are untouched by city life until the outbreak of World War II. They are forced to abandon their Kentucky mountain home and travel to Detroit so that Clovis can participate in the war effort by repairing heavy machinery. Gertie’s survival techniques are useless in an urban milieu. In spite of the debasing effect of city life, Gertie maintains her faith in her fellow beings.

Mountain Path

Kim — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:12:53 +0000

The book is not merely the tale of a few things that happened in the hill country. It is the story of conflicting ways of life, of a girl who, against her will, went to a backwoods community to teach and who, still against her will, learned more than she taught.”

Hunter’s Horn

Kim — Thu, 08 Jan 2026 18:12:52 +0000

Michigan State University Press is proud to announce the re-release Harriette Simpson Arnow’s 1949 novel Hunter’s Horn, a work that Joyce Carol Oates called “our most unpretentious American masterpiece”.In Hunter’s Horn, Arnow has written the quintessential account of Kentucky hill people — the quintessential novel of Southern Appalachian farmers, foxhunters, foxhounds, women, and children. New York Times reviewer Herschel Brickell declared that Arnow “writes … as effortlessly as a bird sings, and the warmth, beauty, the sadness and the ache of life itself are not even once absent from her pages”.Arnow writes about Kentucky in the way that William Faulkner writes about Mississippi, or that Flannery O’Connor writes about Georgia, or that Willa Cather writes about Nebraska — with studied realism, with landscapes and characters that take on mythic proportions, with humor, and with memorable and remarkable attention to details of the human heart that motivate literature.