Harriette Arnow's finest and bestknown novel is The Dollmaker (1954), the third volume in a trilogy which, covering the years between 1920 and 1945, depicts the Southern rural poor in their beautiful but impoverished homeland and traces the losses that occurred in their culture as economic conditions and social change forced them to migrate to industrial areas. Set during World War II, this novel narrates the compelling story of Gertie Nevels, a country woman rooted in Appalachia who, when the war takes her husband north to work in a defense plant, leaves the hills of Kentucky for a housing project in Detroit where she engages in a long and ultimately futile struggle to preserve the decency and integrity of her family. Along with its value as a socioliterary document detailing the specific plight of Southerners who migrated north during the "war effort" of the 1940s, the novel powerfully conveys...