Harriette Arnow

From Philosopedia

Arnow, Harriette Simpson (7 July 1908 - 22 March 1986)

Arnow was born in Wayne County, Kentucky. She attended Berea College before transferring after two years to the University of Louisville. When she moved to Cincinnati, she published her first work in 1935 under a pseudonym - H. L. Simpson - along with her brother-in-law's photo. In 1939 she married Harold B. Arnow, son of Jewish immigrants.

Jill O'Quin has written a biographical sketch, complete with Arnow's photo.

After her successful novel, Dollmaker, was published, she was asked about humanism by Warren Allen Smith and responded:

It should be so simple to sit down and write a sentence or so saying what I do or do not believe. However, it isn’t. It seems sometimes that for most of my life I have been on a long pondering. I grew up in the Christian Church; that was in the South where the Christian Church was the name of a Protestant faith promulgated by Alexander Campbell and known by various names in various places. We were a very religious people, but early doubt troubled me; one of my mother’s cousins was a missionary to China, and I wondered if it were wise to destroy the belief of the Chinese in order to put another in its place; and then I was troubled being certain the devil would get me for such thoughts; and then I was comforted for God had given me a mind and it was up to me to use it; and so I began to go round and round and have been going ever since. I don’t think I am a humanist. I sometimes think I am closer akin to some of the early settlers in Tennessee, Watauga for example; they said little of religion, didn’t apparently have much, but believed that man was bigger than anything made by man, including his religion and political system, but now it would seem that we live in an age where all forces combine to belittle the individual; he exists less as an entity than as a part of something held as of much more importance than himself - his religion, politics, firm, etc.

Time and again I go back to the Jesuit Relations; on one side all educated Frenchmen of one faith, on the other all ignorant savages, but so often the great hardships they endured together makes suffering men, individuals of them all.

Arnow, who became known as the writer of "Appalachian literature," died in her sleep from heart disease.

{WAS, 22 November 1954}