Harriette Simpson Arnow's 1949 novel Hunter's Horn is a work that Joyce Carol Oates called "our most unpretentious American masterpiece".

In Hunter's Horn, Arnow has written the quintessential account of Kentucky hill people -- the quintessential novel of Southern Appalachian farmers, foxhunters, foxhounds, women, and children. New York Times reviewer Herschel Brickell declared that Arnow "writes ... as effortlessly as a bird sings, and the warmth, beauty, the sadness and the ache of life itself are not even once absent from her pages".

Arnow writes about Kentucky in the way that William Faulkner writes about Mississippi, or that Flannery O'Connor writes about Georgia, or that Willa Cather writes about Nebraska -- with studied realism, with landscapes and characters that take on mythic proportions, with humor, and with memorable and remarkable attention to details of the human heart that motivate literature.