The Dollmaker [Paperback]

Harriette Arnow (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 9, 2009

The Dollmaker was originally published in 1954 to immediate success and critical acclaim. In unadorned and powerful prose, Harriette Arnow tells the unforgettable and heartbreaking story of the Nevels family and their quest to preserve their deep-rooted values amidst the turmoil of war and industrialization. When Gertie Nevels, a strong and self-reliant matriarch, follows her husband to Detroit from their countryside home in Kentucky, she learns she will have to fight desperately to keep her family together. A sprawling book full of vividly drawn characters and masterful scenes, The Dollmaker is a passionate tribute to a woman's love for her children and the land.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"The depth and power and stature of this enormous book are rare indeed in modern fiction." -- The New York Times

"The Dollmaker has vividness and terrific reality. It is a book to make one think...a story of the strength of the human heart against bitter odds....Deeply sincere and moving." -- Chicago Tribune

"A masterwork...A superb book of unforgettable strength and glowing richness." -- The New York Times

"The Dollmaker's depiction of family life -- the entangled bonds between parents and children, brothers and sisters -- is unparalleled in modern fiction." -- The Georgia Review

About the Author

Harriette Arnow was born in Wayne County, Kentucky in 1908. From her father, a former teacher who later worked in factories and oil fields, and her mother, also a teacher, Arnow inherited the rich storytelling tradition that inspired much of her written work.  She published her first short stories in 1935 under the pseudonym H.L. Simpson alongside a photograph of her brother-in-law to disguise her gender. Her acclaimed novels, Mountain Path, Hunter’s Horn and The Dollmaker, the last considered her masterpiece and a landmark of American fiction.  She died in 1986 at age seventy-seven.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 688 pages
• Publisher: Scribner; Reissue edition (June 9, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1439154430
• ISBN-13: 978-1439154434
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.3 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 13.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #43,766 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An American Masterpiece, March 10, 2000

By 

Karla Vernon "Karla" (Vienna, VA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Dollmaker (Mass Market Paperback)

The Dollmaker by Harriette Arnow

This is a magnificant, powerful book about a woman's strength, endurance and inner beauty in the face of despair and hopelessness. The innocent faithfulness and innate goodness of Gertie, many times described as a massive, unattractive woman, turns her into an angelic, beautiful creature for the reader. Gertie, always the champion of her children and "good wife" to her husband, triumphs over adversity, fends for herself and emerges as a wonderful role model for people everywhere. For a person characterized with little education, she had the quick thinking, common sense intelligence of someone with far more education. The mountain vernacular was at times difficult to decipher, but with continued reading it became easier. The descriptions of nature and scenery were so richly detailed that it was easy to picture the story--almost as if a movie was being watched. One horrible part in the story was described in such a graphic manner that the reader could literally be sickened, because by this time in the book, the characters are your own, like family members.

This may be one of the greatest works of literature portraying "woman's strength" ever written. Give it a try--you'll like it.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Real for Me, June 23, 2004

By A Customer

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Dollmaker (Mass Market Paperback)

Having grown up in rural Kentucky 'The Dollmaker' was far too real for me. Gertie is a real character, she is the typical strong and determined woman of the mountains. It is almost repulsive that she has to be paired with a man who is a weak and spineless character. Despite it all she was able to create beauty, honor her husband and children and to have dreams in all the despair. Her life is typical for so many women of rural Appalachia from that time.

I would say that one who has to see the movie to critique the book needs to remember that a movie is rarely as worthy as the book. Either read the book or see the movie, most often I choose to do the former. Why let a movie ruin a good book!

Stands out in my mind as one of the all time best reads, comprable to "The Good Earth" by Pearl S. Buck!

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars American Tragedy, May 6, 2006

By 

Eileen Corder (West Coast) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Dollmaker, The (Paperback)

Harriette Arnow, in The Dollmaker, not only chronicles the collapse of the ages-old rural universe of Appalachia and the subsequent historic wave of migration north to the Northern States during WW II, she gives us a giant of a character in Gertie Nevels. Tall as a man, strong as a man, staunchly independent without even knowing it, Gertie nevertheless kowtows to her overbearing mother, then to her husband's wishes to give up her dreams and everything that has ever had meaning in her life. Highly symbolic, each character is nonetheless surging with blood and gristle and clashing with a society that pits human against human, culture against culture, for profit.

Arnow, a brilliant novelist and National Book Award finalist in 1955, has largely been relegated to "regional" literature and somewhat forgot in recent times. Her first novel, Mountain Path, captured a kind of human being we see little of today in America. Both fierce and fearful, generous to a fault but full of grudges and a firm believer of "an eye for an eye", they are of a time and place that is now almost lined-out with Interstates.

In The Dollmaker, Arnow takes what she so masterfully sculpted in her early fiction and brings it into the light of the world. The rough and raw characters of Mountain Path are now thrown into the mix of the new Detroit slums. Bigoted Northerners, foreign-speaking European immigrants, and the reviled hillbillies of Kentucky, Tennessee and beyond come together in an international community amidst the life-and-death early days of unions and union busters.

The Dollmaker is long and by the end I was wrung out. At times I found myself wanting to shake Gertie, at others, to take her in my arms and protect her. In the end she becomes so tragic a being that I was stunned. It is said that Arnow was influenced by Emile Zola's novel Germinal. The similarities are all there, but their messages, and certainly their conclusions, are significantly different.