Hunter's Horn by Harriette Simpson Arnow

She would later say that a young writer should “get work in a place with bus boys. Determined to work as a waitress to keep herself housed and fed, she embarked on her own self-education program to become a writer. She wrote that she would rather starve as a writer than as a teacher.Īrnow moved on her own to Cincinnati in 1934. She contrasted that experience with the one in Louisville where the city children were unruly and disrespectful. Years later she would remember the mountain children she had taught with fondness, their eagerness to learn, their respect for her. She subsequently taught in the city schools for a year and hated it.

When she had saved sufficient money, she went on to attend the University of Louisville where she obtained a bachelor’s degree in education. She earned her teacher’s certificate at Berea College in 1926 and taught for two years in a one-room schoolhouse in rural Kentucky. All five of the Simpson girls finished high school, and all but one went to college, as did their brother.Īrnow knew from early childhood that she wanted to be a writer. Her parents had been schoolteachers and were determined that their children would be educated, in spite of the prevailing view that it was a “waste” to educate girls. Harriette Simpson Arnow was born in 1908 in the Kentucky town of Burnsville on the Cumberland River. She offers visions of heaven and hell.” Ballard thinks of Arnow as “Appalachia’s Dickens.” Her biographer Sandra Ballard describes her work in this way: “She was interested in the edges and people who live on the edges.

Yet, as with all great fiction, her novels transcend the time and place of their settings and speak to wider nuances of the human spirit. Her Appalachian roots surely formed her and gave her work an authenticity and grounding that only the deep connection to place can bring. Harriette Arnow remains one of America’s greatest writers. Sandy Ballard, Harriette Arnow's biographer, gives a talk at the writer's workshop at Hindman Settlement School in Kentucky where Arnow (background) used to teach every summer.

Hunter's Horn by Harriette Simpson Arnow