The first two volumes of Arnow's trilogy about southern hill people are Mountain Path (1936) and Hunter's Horn (1949), both set entirely in rural Kentucky and focusing on the character, beliefs, customs, and struggles of poor whites from this region. Clearly written and competently structured, these novels, like The Dollmaker, demonstrate Arnow's ability to express sympathy for her characters while simultaneously maintaining an artistic distance that lets them tell their own stories.

Mountain Path, except for some melodramatic episodes, offers an absorbing and balanced juxtaposition of two ways of life: that of the inhabitants of a remote and backward area of southeastern Kentucky and that of the more refined and educated world from which the protagonist comes. Partly autobiographical in nature, the novel dramatizes the experiences and emotions of Louisa Sheridan, a precocious intellectual forced to leave college and earn her living by teaching in Cal Valley. To...