Ann Petry - The Street
Rookie Season: Debuts | Week 41º
Rookie Season: Debuts
Extra seasoning for your everyday food for thought
Genre: Urban/Domestic Fiction, Classics
“The funny part of it was she was willing to trust them and their motives without questioning, but the instant they saw the color of her skin they knew what she must be.”
— Ann Petry, The Street
Back Cover (Mariner Books / Houghton Mifflin Company):
“The Street tells the poignant, often heartbreaking, story of Lutie Johnson, a young Black woman, and her spirited struggle to raise her son amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s. First published in 1946, The Street has sold more than a million copies. It’s haunting tale still resonates powerfully today.”
The Street, the debut novel by American author Ann Petry, is something of a historical outlier. Although the first novel by a Black woman in America to sell over one million copies (having never been out-of-print since its first publishing in 1946), the novelist herself, Ann Petry, remains relatively unknown by the general populace.
A true tragedy.
Born October 12, 1908, Ann (Lane) Petry grew up in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Raised by a family of pharmacists, Petry would begin her professional career as a pharmacist as well, writing short fiction in her spare time.
Married in 1938, Petry moved to New York City with her husband, George, where she worked as a reporter for the Harlem Amsterdam News, the People's Voice, and Crisis, a magazine published monthly by the NAACP. For a time she also worked at a Harlem after-school program on 116th Street.1
The move to New York City left a major impression on Petry, particularly, regarding the plight of her fellow African Americans, as her experience growing up in Connecticut was somewhat charmed, in comparison to other Black families at the time.
As Petry’s daughter, Liz Petry, would state (years later, reflecting on her mother’s most popular work), “The Street upset me dreadfully when I was young. My mother really is a very upbeat person, and I was surprised that it was so down. I can only guess at what she went through when she moved to New York and saw all these disenfranchised people, totally lacking power in a way that she and our family never did. Her way of dealing with the problem was to write this book, which maybe was something that people who had grown up in Harlem couldn’t do.”2
“‘Filthy rich.’
Richest country in the world.’
‘Make it while you’re young.’
Only you forgot. You forgot you were black and you underestimated the street.”
— Ann Petry, The Street
Did You Know?
Did you know that despite a whirlwind of immediate success with her first novel, Ann Petry (similar to fellow Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen),
shunned the allure of notoriety and fame for more humble living, escaping the glitz and glamour for the sanctity of her hometown of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1947—one year after first publishing The Street in 1946?
Tell Me More . . .
A couple of years after moving back home, in 1949, Ann Petry gave birth to her first and only child, Elisabeth (Liz) Petry, stating (on more than one occasion) that she wanted to be know simply for her “writing.”
Some Food For Thought:
Petry once said:
“Continuous public exposure, though it may make you a ‘personality,’ can diminish you as a person. To be a willing accomplice to the invasion of your own privacy puts a low price on its worth. The creative processes are, or should be, essentially secret, and although naked flesh is now an open commodity, the naked spirit should have sanctuary.”
Scholar, writer, and Columbia University professor, Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin, in a talk for Library of America’s 40th Anniversary Celebration in 2023, speaking on novelist Ann Petry, commented on how Petry’s concept of personal privacy is, “So foreign in our day and time when there is just the desire to be celebrity, especially with social media where everyone seeks the limelight, and yet I cannot help to think that there is wisdom in it.”
Rookie Season: Debuts
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