Published in 1998 (first published 1946)
448 pages
Ann Petry (1908-1997), a black novelist, short story writer, and writer of books for young people, was one of America’s most distinguished authors. She began by studying pharmacy, and upon receiving her PhG in 1931, she worked as a pharmacist in her family’s drugstores in Old Saybrook and Old Lyme. During these years she wrote several short stories. When she married George David Petry in 1938, the course of her life changed. They moved to New York, and Ann went to work for Harlem’s Amsterdam News. By 1941 she was covering general news stories and editing the women’s pages of the People’s Voice in Harlem. Her first published story appeared in 1943 in the Crisis, a magazine published monthly by the NAACP. Afterward she began work on her first novel – The Street, published in 1946 – for which she received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. She wrote two more novels, The Country Place and The Narrows, and numerous short stories, articles, and children’s books. She was also appointed visiting professor of English at the University of Hawaii and lectured widely throughout the United States.
What is this book about?
‘Ann Petry’s first novel, The Street, was a literary event in 1946, praised and translated around the world – the first book by a black woman to sell more than a million copies . . . Her work endures not merely because of the strength of its message but its artistry’ NEW YORK TIMES
‘My favorite type of novel, literary with an astonishing plot . . . insightful, prescient and unputdownable’ TAYARI JONES
New York City, 1940s. In a crumbling tenement in Harlem, Lutie Johnson is determined to build a new life for herself and her eight-year-old boy, Bub – a life that she can be proud of. Having left her unreliable husband, Lutie believes that with hard work and resolve, she can begin again; she has faith in the American dream. But in her struggle to earn money and raise her son amid the violence, poverty and racial dissonance of her surroundings, Lutie is soon trapped: she is a woman alone, ‘too good-looking to be decent’, with predators at every turn.
