Harriette Simpson Arnow

Born in Wayne County, Kentucky on July 7, 1908, Arnow lived on a farm near Ann Arbor, Michigan for most of her life. Arnow attended Berea College for two years (1926-1928) before completing her de...

Hunter's Horn

Harriette Simpson Arnow

Michigan State University Press is proud to announce the re-release of Harriette Simpson Arnow's 1949 novel Hunter's Horn, a work that Joyce Carol Oates called "our most unpretentious American masterpiece."  
 
In Hunter's Horn, Arnow has written the quintessential account of Kentucky hill people--the quintessential novel of Southern Appalachian farmers, foxhunters, foxhounds, women, and children. New York Times reveiwer Hirschel Brickell declared that Arnow "writes...as effortlessly as a bird sings, and the warmth, beauty, the sadness and the ache of life itself are not even once absent from her pages."  
 
Arnow writes about Kentucky in the way that William Faulkner writes about Mississippi, that Flannery O'Connor writes about Georgia, or that Willa Cather writes about Nebraska--with studied realism, with landscapes and characters that take on mythic proportions, with humor, and with memorable and remarkable attention to details of the human heart that motivate literature.  
 
 
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"...[T]his is the strongest contender I have seen for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction. In these pages Harriette Arnow has brought to glowing life a people, a way of life, and a culture. Neither William Faulkner nor Jesse Stuart, I think, has done better...and it is my guess that Mrs. Arnow's book will have wider appeal for people everywhere than the books of either."
 
-Victor Hass, Saturday Review, 1949