Harriett Simpson Arnow’s "The Dollmaker" is one of the staples of Appalachian literature. For years, our only saleable copies were those little, hard-to-read mass market paperbacks. Now, I am pleased to report, we have an attractive regular sized softback edition in stock.

"The Dollmaker" begins magnificently on a Kentucky road, where Gertie Nevels, a big woman astride a mule prepares to force any car that comes along to stop because she needs help. She is carrying her dangerously-sick son and she must get to a town doctor. Her sheer force of personality guarantees her son’s survival, but it is the last real success of her life.

The Nevels live on a piece of rented land in the Kentucky mountains, where they struggle to extract a living from poor land. Gertie dreams of owning a little farm where she can rear her five children in peace and security. Clovis, her husband, a shade-tree mechanic and part-time coal hauler, wants to go to Detroit and make big money. Clovis goes to Cincinnati to take his World War II military service examination, fails it, and then goes to Detroit and gets a factory job. With great misgivings, Gertie uproots her children and joins her husband.

In 1954, when Arnow wrote her masterwork, "The Dollmaker," she broke new ground by uprooting a mountain family and following them into a northern industrial ghetto, portraying each member’s search for a new identity, particularly the wife and mother, Gertie Nevels.

In Detroit the family moves into a crowded government housing project, a melting-pot of nationalities, religions, and social classes.

Gertie, the central figure of the novel, is a raw-boned woman cast in a heroic mold. She still longs for the peace and comfort of the hills, but, with her children readily adjusting to the new environment, she turns her resourceful energies to finding meaning in the crowded alley where she lives.

Gertie has a sharp-bladed pocketknife that she carries in her apron. With it she once whittled handles for farm tools and carved dolls with jointed legs and arms. She also has a great block of cherry wood from which she is carving a bust of Jesus.

As the novel ends, Gertie is having her treasured block of wood cut into pieces from which she can carve crucifixes and other small objects that will sell.

Most readers see Gertie’s final act as her own capitulation to life "at the North" and also the surrender and final swallowing up of an American way of life. Like many great works, it is ripe with sadness and despair. Like John Steinbeck’s "The Grapes of Wrath," it is a depressing picture of human defeat and bewilderment.

"The Dollmaker" and other books by Harriett Simpson Arnow and other great Kentucky and Appalachian books are available at the Jesse Stuart Foundation Bookstore, 1645 Winchester Avenue in downtown Ashland.

For more information, call (606)326-1667 or visit our website: JSFBOOKS.COM.

The Regional Readers, a monthly reading club, meet at the Jesse Stuart Foundation on Tuesday from 5:45-7:00 p.m. We’ll be discussing Silas House’s current book, "The Coal Tattoo." Please join us.