Many writers have emerged from Kentucky, often sharing the uniqueness and beauty that the state has to offer.

Pulaski County native Harriette Simpson Arnow did just that, capturing the oneness of rural Kentucky with remarkable honesty and character.

Let's explore the legacy of one of America's most important literary voices.

[music playing] [music playing] Harriette Simpson Arnow writes in her own style.

She is a unique author.

She's very independently minded.

She never declares herself a spokeswoman for the region, but I think that she just feels the need to imbue Appalachians with dignity and imbue them with integrity.

Harriette Arnow was a Kentuckian, born in Pulaski County, raised in Burnside, educated for a couple of years at Berea College, and then as a graduate of what is now the University of Louisville.

She also was employed by the Federal Writers' Project during the Depression and made her life as a writer in writing stories about Appalachia, but often outside of Appalachia.

She starts writing when she lives in Kentucky as a teacher.

Then she does something quite unusual in the midst of the Depression in 1934.

She leaves her teaching job and moves to Cincinnati, Ohio, where she takes a job as a waitress, but for the most part, she lives alone and teaches herself how to write.

She also worked in a New Deal organization called the Works Progress Administration in Cincinnati.

Some of the really core American understandings of that era come from WPA writers.

She also met her husband there, who was a journalist and a newspaper man, and that really shaped where her life would go from Cincinnati.

They returned to Pulaski County for a short time and then ended up in Detroit, which is where most of her writing took place.

She gets up 4:00, 5:00 every morning, writes for two hours, then gets her children and husband ready for school and work, but she does that grind day after day.

She finds her own voice in that time, and within a few years she is publishing in prestigious literary journals like the Southern Review, and within 10 years she is a nationally known author.

All of her writing is influenced by her time in Appalachian Kentucky.

She wanted to talk about her region, or some people would call it fictional realism.

Times and places were mingled in my head.

The past was part of the present, close as the red cedar water bucket in the kitchen, or the big cherry press put together with pegs, or the parched corn a grandmother now and then made for us.

This was the same as the parched corn from the old days, or the cornmeal mush we sometimes ate, no different at all from the mush in the stories.

An old shirt in a trunk upstairs, square-armholed, stitched by hand of cotton grown and woven and spun on the big south fork of the Cumberland, could have been the same as that worn by some old grandpa with many greats before his name.

My people loved the past more than their present lives, I think, but it cannot be said we lived in the past.

Two things tied all time together.

These had run through most of the old stories to shape the lives of men, and so did they shape our lives and the lives of the people about us.

These were the land and the Cumberland.

The Dollmaker is probably her best-known work.

The Dollmaker is set in Detroit, Michigan.

It's about a family who has migrated to seek work.

So, they've gone from Appalachia to urban Michigan.

They have to go from a life of self-sufficiency in Kentucky to a setting where you have housing projects, and it's about really the main character, Gertie Nevels.

Gertie has to hold her family together.

She has to be the backbone of the family while making this adjustment and also holding on to her integrity.

The significance of the Dollmaker, I think, is that it was 1954.

It's in the midst of the migration of Appalachians to urban centers.

At the time, there were no resources that teachers or educators or social workers in the North had to understand Appalachian migrants.

She really captured that early migration in a way that no other American writer has.

I think she's always thinking about home.

I think dignity is a theme that runs throughout Arnow's canon.

She also was particularly careful in describing women, and she really placed a lot of value on making sure that women's lives were captured in her writing in a way that was true to the women she knew.

I think that she is a strong historian as a novelist, and the way that she emphasizes the roles of women in Appalachian history, she's very ahead of the game.

She's taking pains to get every word right, to get every description right, to make sure that scenes flow into the next one.

So, it's just this absolute dedication to the craft and dedication to the higher purpose of, again, imbuing Appalachian characters with dignity.

Often, Appalachia at the time is treated as folklore, as something that's at best quaint.

So, I think by portraying mid-century Appalachians in mid-century, showing that they are part of the nation, that they are part of our fabric of society, showing that they do have great values like a work ethic, a belief in family, a belief in personal integrity.

I think that she's making this very valuable intervention, saying, “We're not yesterday's people.

We have a place.

We have a role in modern society.

You shouldn't sell us short.” Her capturing of the Appalachian diaspora in a way that treats people with kindness and with strength and that centers women is something to be honored and something that we should celebrate.

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