The Kentucky Trace is Arnow's letter home. Coming at the end of her life and career, it contains as much resolution as is to be found in her work about her relationship to Appalachia, to her family, and to her creative vision. It claims for the region a central place in the creation of the American dream. But it has an aura of nostalgia about it. The novel contains several scenes in which Leslie laments the passing of the pristine environment as the pioneers forge west.
Destruction is born with the nation.
And, as we have seen, Arnow's exploration of the nature of her art is fraught with conflict and tension. In its struggle, the novel reveals that resolution was as yet incomplete. I am indebted to Sandra L. Ballard for her transcriptions of two tapes made of lectures delivered by Arnow late in her life in which Arnow speaks of her early experiences rewriting her grandmother's stories and of her mother's expectations regarding her future. Wilton Eckley in his 1974 biography Harriette Arnow also discusses Arnow's conflict with her family. Flowering of the Cumberland .