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The Mountain Path
In order to earn money for her final year of college, Louisa Sheridan agrees to teach school in a remote Kentucky community, called Canebrake
Paperback
First published January 1, 1985
About the author
Harriette Simpson Arnow
20 books94 followersHarriette Simpson Arnow (July 7, 1908 – March 22, 1986) was an American novelist, who lived in Kentucky and Michigan.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
February 17, 2025
I am one of the luckiest readers for having spent valuable time with a little-known author from Kentucky for the past few weeks. Her name is Harriette Simpson Arnow. She hailed from Pulaski County, Kentucky and began her career as a school teacher of the very poor and illiterate deeper in the hills of her county.
Her first novel called Mountain Path was published in 1936. It is very hard to locate an inexpensive copy and therefore very seldom read as you can see by a mere 90 ratings and 12 reviews on Goodreads. I am saddened by this as Arnow’s novels are wonderfully written and her stories tell tales of people and places that are all but near extinct these days. I would say there are traces of the past still looming in these hills in Kentucky, but today’s modernizations have just about overtaken much of the ruralness.
Mountain Path tells the story of a young teacher, Louisa Sheridan, who needed to earn money to pay for her final year at the University of Kentucky. She agreed to a 7-month teaching position in a one-room school in a very isolated community in “Cal Valley”, Kentucky (modern day Somerset area). Arnow made a similar path in her life at age 18 and it’s no surprise that she draws from her own experiences. However, her story goes further than just a vague recounting of her own experiences and takes her readers into the psyche of her protagonist who arrives with preconceived notions and ideas to a place unknown and foreign. Arnow makes clear that Louisa is a fictional character and not a fictional version of herself.
Arnow’s young teacher differs from Marshall’s Christy who set out with a missionary focus in which to help unfortunate children. In Louisa Sheridan, Arnow creates a character who came with a job to do with an end in sight and a goal to get back to the university where she was meant to be. However, the emotional journey she goes on while living in the hills has a dramatic effect on her outlook of the ignorance and unintelligence of people here. Despite illiterate people, she is awakened to understanding that book education is not always the only education that there is nor is it what might be important in this particular place.
She gave a whispered, “Oh” before comprehending suddenly that in this land illiteracy did not necessarily mean ignorance. She felt a disturbing respect for this tall, unshaven man who couldn’t read. She felt he knew things, important things about living, had an understanding beyond her own.
Arnow’s prose is gorgeous, her descriptions of the area and the ways in which she describes physical features of the people is filled with emotion and life. Here she describes the woman, Corie Cal, mother and wife of the family with which Louisa is to live while she is here:
She was large; not hippy after the fashion of well-fed women in cities, but tall and thin and rangy with long loosely put together bones, and a long neck set under a long but well-shaped head. Her jaws were long and thin, so was her nose, and her chin long and pointed—almost pretty. Her feet, however, were what caused Louisa to forget that it was impolite to stare. They were long like the rest of her; narrow heels, long wide-spreading toes with each great toe standing a little apart from its smaller sisters, and seemingly enjoying a much wider range of experience. In color they were a shade darker than her face, and but little lighter than her hair, for Corie was a rhapsody in brown, even her blue eyes were flecked with lights the color of brown sand in yellow sunlight.
There is a feeling of awe and respect here in the hills and when she arrives she is aware of a trouble that is occurring and realizes that it has been occurring for a very long time. People here don’t forget things and secrets are closely held and not revealed from adults all the way on down to the children. Boundaries are drawn and not crossed, a lesson she learned from the children on a day when she crossed into an area they were not permitted to cross into. Ghosts or “haints” are prevalent and feuds between rivals cannot be smote. Moonshine was an old past time because whiskey was a necessity and not a sin or crime in their eyes. Back then, whiskey was a common drug used to heal snake bites and sicknesses. When moonshining began to be taxed and the regular man couldn’t afford to pay, this business slowly began to disappear as a legitimate occupation and went to the bigger distillers.
This is a beautiful book in which Arnow captures the people and the place in such a captivating and exquisite way. While The Dollmaker may be considered her masterpiece, Arnow’s other novels deserve just as much attention and respect as important histories of a place and people who have disappeared into the passage of time and the changing of ways as the world and the country changes.
A huge thanks to my Buddy reading partner, Dave Marsland, who always makes reading more fun and adds richly to our discussions which teach me a lot! I look forward to the next one!
Here’s a link to Dave’s review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
Her first novel called Mountain Path was published in 1936. It is very hard to locate an inexpensive copy and therefore very seldom read as you can see by a mere 90 ratings and 12 reviews on Goodreads. I am saddened by this as Arnow’s novels are wonderfully written and her stories tell tales of people and places that are all but near extinct these days. I would say there are traces of the past still looming in these hills in Kentucky, but today’s modernizations have just about overtaken much of the ruralness.
Mountain Path tells the story of a young teacher, Louisa Sheridan, who needed to earn money to pay for her final year at the University of Kentucky. She agreed to a 7-month teaching position in a one-room school in a very isolated community in “Cal Valley”, Kentucky (modern day Somerset area). Arnow made a similar path in her life at age 18 and it’s no surprise that she draws from her own experiences. However, her story goes further than just a vague recounting of her own experiences and takes her readers into the psyche of her protagonist who arrives with preconceived notions and ideas to a place unknown and foreign. Arnow makes clear that Louisa is a fictional character and not a fictional version of herself.
Arnow’s young teacher differs from Marshall’s Christy who set out with a missionary focus in which to help unfortunate children. In Louisa Sheridan, Arnow creates a character who came with a job to do with an end in sight and a goal to get back to the university where she was meant to be. However, the emotional journey she goes on while living in the hills has a dramatic effect on her outlook of the ignorance and unintelligence of people here. Despite illiterate people, she is awakened to understanding that book education is not always the only education that there is nor is it what might be important in this particular place.
She gave a whispered, “Oh” before comprehending suddenly that in this land illiteracy did not necessarily mean ignorance. She felt a disturbing respect for this tall, unshaven man who couldn’t read. She felt he knew things, important things about living, had an understanding beyond her own.
Arnow’s prose is gorgeous, her descriptions of the area and the ways in which she describes physical features of the people is filled with emotion and life. Here she describes the woman, Corie Cal, mother and wife of the family with which Louisa is to live while she is here:
She was large; not hippy after the fashion of well-fed women in cities, but tall and thin and rangy with long loosely put together bones, and a long neck set under a long but well-shaped head. Her jaws were long and thin, so was her nose, and her chin long and pointed—almost pretty. Her feet, however, were what caused Louisa to forget that it was impolite to stare. They were long like the rest of her; narrow heels, long wide-spreading toes with each great toe standing a little apart from its smaller sisters, and seemingly enjoying a much wider range of experience. In color they were a shade darker than her face, and but little lighter than her hair, for Corie was a rhapsody in brown, even her blue eyes were flecked with lights the color of brown sand in yellow sunlight.
There is a feeling of awe and respect here in the hills and when she arrives she is aware of a trouble that is occurring and realizes that it has been occurring for a very long time. People here don’t forget things and secrets are closely held and not revealed from adults all the way on down to the children. Boundaries are drawn and not crossed, a lesson she learned from the children on a day when she crossed into an area they were not permitted to cross into. Ghosts or “haints” are prevalent and feuds between rivals cannot be smote. Moonshine was an old past time because whiskey was a necessity and not a sin or crime in their eyes. Back then, whiskey was a common drug used to heal snake bites and sicknesses. When moonshining began to be taxed and the regular man couldn’t afford to pay, this business slowly began to disappear as a legitimate occupation and went to the bigger distillers.
This is a beautiful book in which Arnow captures the people and the place in such a captivating and exquisite way. While The Dollmaker may be considered her masterpiece, Arnow’s other novels deserve just as much attention and respect as important histories of a place and people who have disappeared into the passage of time and the changing of ways as the world and the country changes.
A huge thanks to my Buddy reading partner, Dave Marsland, who always makes reading more fun and adds richly to our discussions which teach me a lot! I look forward to the next one!
Here’s a link to Dave’s review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
March 9, 2008
I haven't finished reading this book yet, but I'm very much enjoying it. My Dad hailed from the same Kentucky community as the author, and, in fact, his family knew her family fairly well--well enough to be upset when the author used our family name as the name for one of the families in the book!
I can fully attest, though, that we were never moonshiners or vigilantes! Apparently, the author had to embellish the story for the publisher, which changed the tale from one about everyday life in Appalachia to something more dramatic, gothic even.
Still, I have enjoyed this book so far and would recommend it to others. The lifeways ring true, and every page makes me remember my Dad and a little homesick for Kentucky.
I can fully attest, though, that we were never moonshiners or vigilantes! Apparently, the author had to embellish the story for the publisher, which changed the tale from one about everyday life in Appalachia to something more dramatic, gothic even.
Still, I have enjoyed this book so far and would recommend it to others. The lifeways ring true, and every page makes me remember my Dad and a little homesick for Kentucky.
September 19, 2026
Uncommonly beautiful. Harriette Simpson Arnow is the Thomas Hardy of America's hill people.
June 28, 2007
This is an amazing story of a girl from small town Kentucky trying to make something of her life, only to realize that Kentucky was her life after all. Only when she embraces her roots does she begin to know herself.
December 18, 2022
This is a wonderful story.
It brings to mind the novel Christy, by Catherine Marshall, which I greatly enjoyed reading back in the 70s.
It brings to mind the novel Christy, by Catherine Marshall, which I greatly enjoyed reading back in the 70s.
February 14, 2025
I’m slightly in awe of Harriette Simpson Arnow. I consider her to be one of America’s greatest writers.
A couple of years ago I read The Dollmaker and thought it was one of the best books I’d ever read. After reading Mountain Path and Hunter’s Horn I’m not even convinced The Dollmaker was the best book she wrote. It was her most widely read novel (and accessible) and was the final book in her Appalachian trilogy. I’m not going to split hairs and pick a favourite, they were all brilliant.
Harriette Simpson was born in 1908, in Wayne County, Kentucky, and grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians, close to where the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River emerges from the East Kentucky Coalfield. She attended Berea College as a teenager and the became a teacher in a one room school in Pulaski County, Kentucky. Mountain Path isn’t an autobiography, but it based on her experiences. Most of her fiction is based in that area (along with the migration North from Kentucky) and she writes about how the economic and social framework of rural hill communities was changed by electricity, education, roads, the World Wars. Moonshine and family feuds are never far from the surface. It is mainly men folk being stupid. But it’s her observations about women that shapes her writing so brilliantly:
"She thought of the other women with children in their arms who would come over this road before a 100 years ago, 50 years ago, this evening. They too must have known trouble and fear for their men. What were there what were their secret wifely thoughts? Did they feel secure and safe and filled with husband and children or were they like herself - empty, trying to live so as to feel nothing, watching, thinking , "This is not my life. I am preparing for my real life. Someday I shall live and be a success. I am already ashamed that I was so frightened a little while ago over a man who is nothing to me. But I remember that once I rode on unafraid in the dark and carried a baby in my arms."
She also wrote two books and the cultural and social history of the region:
Seedtime on the Cumberland
Flowering of the Cumberland
I'm currently reading Seedtime on the Cumberland and it is excellent.
She was passionate about the landscape and the fauna, it jumps off every page. You can almost smell her novels.
The vernacular may put you off, but celebrate it. I loved the dialogue, it wasn’t too far away from how my grandparents spoke (they were from Yorkshire).
"If' n so much ez two hawgs git tu fightin' don't take side with neither."
The prose is etched with dialect, and it brings Appalachian people to life. Maybe it was this regionalist approach that made her a slightly obscure writer, but this very approach to the region also gave a very universal experience. Her characterisation was sublime, never condescending or overly sentimental.
In Mountain Path I fell in love, fell out of love, laughed, cried and screamed. The ending (and it is a bit of a page turner) made me howl at the moon.
I was very lucky insomuch as I read this with my wonderful friend Lori Keeton. She is such a great reading partner, and coming from Kentucky she is the most perfect friend for reading Harriette Simpson Arnow. We read Hunter’s Horn together also. I’m so fortunate to have a friend who had the smarts to explain the bits I didn’t understand, and to act as a translator when needed. Thanks Lori!
Here is her wonderful review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
It’s a real shame that her books are so hard to access, because I believe Harriette Simpson Arnow to be one of America’s best ever writers. I understand that they are hard to get hold of, and I would lend you my copy, only it’s too good to loan out. It’s a book that’s too close to my heart. You know that feeling. So if you have a birthday, or an occasion on the horizon, ask somebody to find you a copy of Mountain Path, or Hunter’s Horn. Read them both. Celebrate this wonderful author, you won’t regret it.
A couple of years ago I read The Dollmaker and thought it was one of the best books I’d ever read. After reading Mountain Path and Hunter’s Horn I’m not even convinced The Dollmaker was the best book she wrote. It was her most widely read novel (and accessible) and was the final book in her Appalachian trilogy. I’m not going to split hairs and pick a favourite, they were all brilliant.
Harriette Simpson was born in 1908, in Wayne County, Kentucky, and grew up in the foothills of the Appalachians, close to where the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River emerges from the East Kentucky Coalfield. She attended Berea College as a teenager and the became a teacher in a one room school in Pulaski County, Kentucky. Mountain Path isn’t an autobiography, but it based on her experiences. Most of her fiction is based in that area (along with the migration North from Kentucky) and she writes about how the economic and social framework of rural hill communities was changed by electricity, education, roads, the World Wars. Moonshine and family feuds are never far from the surface. It is mainly men folk being stupid. But it’s her observations about women that shapes her writing so brilliantly:
"She thought of the other women with children in their arms who would come over this road before a 100 years ago, 50 years ago, this evening. They too must have known trouble and fear for their men. What were there what were their secret wifely thoughts? Did they feel secure and safe and filled with husband and children or were they like herself - empty, trying to live so as to feel nothing, watching, thinking , "This is not my life. I am preparing for my real life. Someday I shall live and be a success. I am already ashamed that I was so frightened a little while ago over a man who is nothing to me. But I remember that once I rode on unafraid in the dark and carried a baby in my arms."
She also wrote two books and the cultural and social history of the region:
Seedtime on the Cumberland
Flowering of the Cumberland
I'm currently reading Seedtime on the Cumberland and it is excellent.
She was passionate about the landscape and the fauna, it jumps off every page. You can almost smell her novels.
The vernacular may put you off, but celebrate it. I loved the dialogue, it wasn’t too far away from how my grandparents spoke (they were from Yorkshire).
"If' n so much ez two hawgs git tu fightin' don't take side with neither."
The prose is etched with dialect, and it brings Appalachian people to life. Maybe it was this regionalist approach that made her a slightly obscure writer, but this very approach to the region also gave a very universal experience. Her characterisation was sublime, never condescending or overly sentimental.
In Mountain Path I fell in love, fell out of love, laughed, cried and screamed. The ending (and it is a bit of a page turner) made me howl at the moon.
I was very lucky insomuch as I read this with my wonderful friend Lori Keeton. She is such a great reading partner, and coming from Kentucky she is the most perfect friend for reading Harriette Simpson Arnow. We read Hunter’s Horn together also. I’m so fortunate to have a friend who had the smarts to explain the bits I didn’t understand, and to act as a translator when needed. Thanks Lori!
Here is her wonderful review:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
It’s a real shame that her books are so hard to access, because I believe Harriette Simpson Arnow to be one of America’s best ever writers. I understand that they are hard to get hold of, and I would lend you my copy, only it’s too good to loan out. It’s a book that’s too close to my heart. You know that feeling. So if you have a birthday, or an occasion on the horizon, ask somebody to find you a copy of Mountain Path, or Hunter’s Horn. Read them both. Celebrate this wonderful author, you won’t regret it.
March 11, 2025
If you have never read anything by Harriet Simpson Arnow, you could not do better than starting where she did, with this, her first novel. I was prepared for it to be less devastating and less perfect than The Dollmaker, but I need not have feared–it was flawless.
This is the story of Louisa Sheridan, a young girl who signs up for a 7-month stint teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in the Appalachian hills of Kentucky. Arnow knows these hills, she knows these people, and she understands the undertaking of teaching here, as she did that job herself. What she does with all that knowledge is weave a story that rings so true that you feel it is happening to you.
Her characters are presented with such finesse that you feel you know each of them, and she does it with the same scarcity of words that you would have gotten if you had walked into the hills in the 1930s and sat down at a kitchen table. As you would expect, there are secrets and troubles and a great deal of pride in such a remote community. Louisa does not always understand what is going on around her, but she comes to respect these people, the hard lives they lead, and the difficult choices they make.
Louisa had never been grateful for anything, but from Corie she learned gratefulness and thankfulness for all things: dry wood, rain when the spring was low, cold snaps that cured up colds and made a spell for killing hogs, sunshiny days, snowy days (they meant good crops), hard frozen bare ground for it was then that the children did not wet their feet or ruin their shoes.
Louisa learns a great deal from these people she has come to teach. She finds there is something lovely about them, something brilliant and joyful and yet haunting and sober; something that is missing in the civilised life she left behind. And there is a darker side that defines them just as surely as the sound of the fiddle and the old folk songs.
Chris’s laws were of the hill law, older than the modern mechanism of law, rooted in freedom and living in people rather than in books.
How marvelous that Arnow captured this time on paper and left it for us to time travel back into, insulated from its cruelties of poverty and place. I don’t think she has taken any great liberties with reality. I think you could have found these people, not so long ago, living and breathing.
If you want to read a truly fabulous review of this book, read this one by my friend, Lori:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
This is the story of Louisa Sheridan, a young girl who signs up for a 7-month stint teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in the Appalachian hills of Kentucky. Arnow knows these hills, she knows these people, and she understands the undertaking of teaching here, as she did that job herself. What she does with all that knowledge is weave a story that rings so true that you feel it is happening to you.
Her characters are presented with such finesse that you feel you know each of them, and she does it with the same scarcity of words that you would have gotten if you had walked into the hills in the 1930s and sat down at a kitchen table. As you would expect, there are secrets and troubles and a great deal of pride in such a remote community. Louisa does not always understand what is going on around her, but she comes to respect these people, the hard lives they lead, and the difficult choices they make.
Louisa had never been grateful for anything, but from Corie she learned gratefulness and thankfulness for all things: dry wood, rain when the spring was low, cold snaps that cured up colds and made a spell for killing hogs, sunshiny days, snowy days (they meant good crops), hard frozen bare ground for it was then that the children did not wet their feet or ruin their shoes.
Louisa learns a great deal from these people she has come to teach. She finds there is something lovely about them, something brilliant and joyful and yet haunting and sober; something that is missing in the civilised life she left behind. And there is a darker side that defines them just as surely as the sound of the fiddle and the old folk songs.
Chris’s laws were of the hill law, older than the modern mechanism of law, rooted in freedom and living in people rather than in books.
How marvelous that Arnow captured this time on paper and left it for us to time travel back into, insulated from its cruelties of poverty and place. I don’t think she has taken any great liberties with reality. I think you could have found these people, not so long ago, living and breathing.
If you want to read a truly fabulous review of this book, read this one by my friend, Lori:
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
September 29, 2023
I wanted to love this book, but the way Arnow writes the mountain people talk, it's just too hard to follow along easily.
What was wonderful was the colorful descriptions of the mountains, flora, food. I love all things from Appalachia, and this gave me a good feel for the area. I got a true feeling of how isolated the people were, how they really had only themselves and their neighbors, no one from outside. It was too difficult to get that deep into their area.
Love that.
What was wonderful was the colorful descriptions of the mountains, flora, food. I love all things from Appalachia, and this gave me a good feel for the area. I got a true feeling of how isolated the people were, how they really had only themselves and their neighbors, no one from outside. It was too difficult to get that deep into their area.
Love that.
February 2, 2020
Now I must make a vinegar pie.
June 28, 2020
Very seldom do I give 5 stars. This is one of the best books i have ever read.
January 2, 2021
C-. fiction, Kentucky, 1930s, style of writing, plus local vernacular made it difficult to follow
August 9, 2024
Timeless story of humanity
Anything by Harriet's Arnow is a greeat read, but I always end up crying at the end. As far from this setting as we are now, the lives are still so relatable
Anything by Harriet's Arnow is a greeat read, but I always end up crying at the end. As far from this setting as we are now, the lives are still so relatable
July 9, 2013
Enjoyed it very much; was glad to find it in electronic form so I could read it. Imagery had me right in the hills from where my family hails from.
June 12, 2007
Out of print, but worth finding at your library. A moonshiner and a teacher and Appalachia.
March 27, 2017
Published in 1936. This novel of life in Kentucky back up in the hollers written by Harriette L. Simpson Arnow is my introduction to this author. She grew up in Kentucky. This novel rings true and gives us readers a glimpse into another world that is a part of our country. I did not want to put this book down . The 1963 edition added an introduction written by the author. It adds immeasurable depth to the story and background of the author. I am eager to read all that this woman has written.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews