Arnow has been called an expert on the people of the Southern Appalachian Mountains, but she herself loved cities and spent crucial periods of her life in Cincinnati and Detroit.

[1] Arnow would later credit her father, Elias Thomas Simpson, and her maternal grandmother, Harriette Le Grand Foster Denney for inspiring her desire to write with their storytelling.

[3] In 1935 she published her first works in Esquire, two short stories, "A Mess of Pork" and "Marigolds and Mules", under the pen name H. L. Simpson, sending a photo of her brother-in-law to disguise her gender.

Now billing herself as Harriette Arnow, her 1949 novel, Hunter's Horn,[1] was a best seller and received considerable critical acclaim, finishing close to William Faulkner's A Fable in that year's voting for the Pulitzer Prize.

Told through the eyes of Gertie Nevels, a woman torn from the woods and farmland to move with her children to join her husband living in World War II factory workers' housing in Detroit, it can be seen as a work of feminist fiction.

Arnow herself disputed this characterization however, preferring to see it as an individual woman's struggle to survive in a harsh and changing world[6] Of her writing she said, "I am afflicted with too many words ... Like the characters in my books, I talk too much and tell things I shouldn't tell.