Harriette Simpson Arnow

Herb E. Smith. 1987. 16 mm Film. 

Harriette Simpson Arnow introduces readers of The Dollmaker to its author – a feisty, funny, out-spoken, talented and hardworking woman in interviews filmed not long before her death. Arnow provides the basic biographical details of her life and reveals the difficulties of being a writer, a wife and a mother, roles that she balanced for much of her career. The film explores her experience teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in her native Pulaski County, Kentucky; how she left the mountains looking for work and an opportunity to write; and of the struggle to find the time and energy to write while raising a family, first on a Appalachian farm, then in wartime Detroit.

“Celebrates the life and works of this wrongfully neglected southern author … Perhaps this document will bring much deserved attention to this fine writer and extraordinary woman.”— Southern Quarterly 

"The film, like the person it honors, is unaffected, straightforward and honest.”—East Tennessee State University

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