The Dollmaker [Hardcover]

Harriette Simpson Arnow (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1985

Strong-willed, self-reliant Gertie Nevels's peaceful life in the Kentucky hills is devastated by the brutal winds of change. Uprooted from her backwoods home, she and her family are thrust into the confusion and chaos of wartime Detroit. And in a pitiless world of unendurable poverty, Gertie will battle fiercely and relentlessly to protect those things she holds most dear -- her children, her heritage . . . and her triumphant ability to create beauty in the suffocating shadow of ugliness and despair.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

In the opening scene of The Dollmaker a rough-hewn, uneducated woman performs a tracheotomy on her dying son, guided only by her love for her child and rural common sense. Thus we are introduced to Gertie Nevells, one of the most amazing women in literature. Gertie is a powerful, compassionate woman, a wood sculptor, a mother who talks to her daughter's imaginary playmates. Her one dream is to buy her own farm in the backwoods of the South and live there with her husband and children. But World War II intervenes, and as a good wife she must take her children and follow her husband to Detroit, where he has been put to work in a war factory. In the city, Gertie fights desperately to keep her family together and maintain their rural values, but it's a hard fight and even her flowers seem to know it: "There was something frantic in their blooming, as if they knew that frost was near and then the bitter cold. They'd lived through all the heat and noise and stench of summertime, and now each widely opened flower was like a triumphant cry, 'We will, we will make seed before we die.' " A big book, full of vividly drawn characters and masterful scenes, The Dollmaker is both a passionate denunciation of industrialization and war, and a tribute to a woman's love for her children and the land. -- For great reviews of books for girls, check out Let's Hear It for the Girls: 375 Great Books for Readers 2-14. -- From 500 Great Books by Women; review by Erica Bauermeister --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Harriette Arnow was born in 1908 into a family whose roots reached back for five generations of Kentucky's history. From this rich background, she inherited a bountiful storytelling tradition that provided inspiration for her acclaimed novels: Mountain Path, Hunter's Horn, and The Dollmaker, the last considered her masterpiece and a landmark of American fiction. She dies in 1986. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 549 pages
• Publisher: Univ Pr of Kentucky (December 1985)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813115442
• ISBN-13: 978-0813115443
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.7 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,192,668 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 36 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.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

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

By A Customer

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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!

25 of 27 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.