Harriette Simpson Arnow is best known for her novel, The Dollmaker, in print almost continuously since its publication in 1954. Few novels so movingly and unsparingly dramatize the anguish of the dispossessed rural poor trying to retain their values and integrity in a violent urban environment. Without the sentimentality that mars some other novels about forced migration, The Dollmaker chronicles the attempts of its heroine, Gertie Nevels, a hulking Kentucky hill woman, to preserve her family, her creativity, and her pride in her hill heritage. An acknowledged masterpiece, The Dollmaker has overshadowed Arnow's other fiction, which is yet to be assessed as fully.

A masterful storyteller who uses traditional narrative form, Arnow feels that her desire to tell stories, or write fiction, was kindled as a child, when she heard her parents and grandmothers spin tales about her forebears from before the Revolutionary War. In her parents' strict, religious...