Author Harriette Arnow Dies at 77

Harriette Arnow, a transplanted Kentuckian whose novels reflect her Southern roots, has died at her sprawling Michigan farmhouse. The author of “The Dollmaker” was 77.

Mrs. Arnow, who had lived in Michigan for the past 40 years, was found dead of natural causes Saturday.

“The Dollmaker,” the story of a Kentucky sharecropper family adjusting to life in Detroit during World War II, was considered her finest work. It was a best-seller and runner-up for the 1955 National Book Award.

The novel’s protagonist is an Appalachian woman who makes wooden dolls and who is forced to relocate to the industrial North when her husband accepts a job there. The book received renewed attention in 1984 when it was made into a television movie of the same name starring Jane Fonda.

Mrs. Arnow, widow of a Detroit journalist, said she did not “like to be tagged” as a regional writer, adding, “It would be nice to be called a writer, just a writer.”

But her Southern background greatly influenced what Arnow wrote.

She grew up in Burnside, Ky., 90 miles south of Lexington. Her father worked as a tool dresser and her mother gave up teaching to raise six children, of whom the writer was the second oldest.

“My people, to begin with, lived only a short distance from their childhood homes, where generations of forebears had lived,” she once said.

“This made, I think, for a great richness of tradition and legend. Both grandmothers were good storytellers and were full of hand-me-down stories, some going back to the Revolution.”

Mrs. Arnow earned the money for her first typewriter at age 13 by milking cows, and she once said that “writing has been to me what knitting and crocheting are to many women.”

She wrote three other novels --”Mountain Path,” “Hunter’s Horn” and “Kentucky Trace”--and three nonfiction works--”Seedtime on the Cumberland,” “Flowering of the Cumberland” and “Old Burnside.”

At her death, she had just completed a 900-page draft for a new novel with a Civil War theme.