Harriette Arnow (1908–1986)
Autor/a de The Dollmaker
Sobre l'autor
Crèdit de la imatge: New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Reproduction Number LC-USZ62-117675
Sèrie
Obres de Harriette Arnow
Nukentekijä. Osa 1 2 exemplars
Nukentekijä. Osa 2 2 exemplars
Le couteau 1 exemplars
Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow (August 01,1976) 1 exemplars
Obres associades
Reader's Digest Condensed Books: Run Silent, Run Deep / The Dollmaker / Crusader's Tomb / Hunter / Mischief (1955) — Col·laborador — 2 exemplars
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Nom oficial
- Arnow, Harriette Simpson
- Data de naixement
- 1908-07-07
- Data de defunció
- 1986-03-22
- Gènere
- female
- Nacionalitat
- USA
- Lloc de naixement
- Monticello, Wayne County, Kentucky, USA
- Lloc de defunció
- Washtenaw County, Michigan, USA
- Llocs de residència
- Burnside, Kentucky, USA
Cincinnati, Ohio, USA
Detroit, Michigan, USA
Ann Arbor, Michigan, USA - Educació
- University of Louisville
Berea College - Professions
- teacher
novelist
short story writer - Organitzacions
- Federal Writers' Project
- Premis i honors
- Weatherford Award (Special, 1978)
- Biografia breu
- 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.
Membres
Ressenyes
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.
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.… (més)
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.… (més)
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.
Llistes
Favourite Books (1)
Five star books (1)
Premis
Potser també t'agrada
Autors associats
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 15
- També de
- 3
- Membres
- 1,065
- Popularitat
- #24,176
- Valoració
- 4.0
- Ressenyes
- 25
- ISBN
- 58
- Llengües
- 2
- Preferit
- 1
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.
… (més)