Harriette Arnow (July 7, 1908 - March 22, 1986) was a novelist, claimed by both Kentucky and Michigan as a native daughter. Arnow has been called an expert on the people of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, but she herself was never a simple hill woman. She loved cities and spent crucial periods of her life in Cincinnati and Detroit.

She was born Harriette Simpson in Wayne County, Kentucky. Her father worked in factories, and her mother, a former teacher, raised her to be a teacher too. From girlhood, Arnow wanted to write. She attended Berea College for two years before transfering to the University of Louisville. She worked for two years as a teacher, before moving to Cincinnati, Ohio where she published her first works in 1935, two short stories -"A Mess of Pork" and "Marigolds and Mules"- under the pseudonym H.L. Simpson along with a photo of her brother-in-law.

In 1936 she published her first novel, Mountain Path.

She married Harold B. Arnow, the son of Jewish immigrants in 1939. They lived in southern Kentucky before settling in public housing in Detroit, Michigan in 1944. Her 1949 novel Hunter's Horn was a best seller. In 1950 she moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan. She published her most famous work The Dollmaker in 1954. This novel about a poor Kentucky family forced by economic necessity to move to Detroit reflected her own life. Later works included the historical studies Seedtime on the Cumberland and Flowering of the Cumberland. Her last novels were The Weedkiller's Daughter, 1970, The Kentucky Trace, 1974, and Old Burnside, 1977. She died in 1986. Michigan State University Press brought out her previously unpublished second novel Between the Flowers in 1999.

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