Ann Petry

Petry, Ann (b. 1908), novelist, short story writer, author of books for children and juveniles, essayist, poet, and lecturer. Ann Petry was born above her father's drugstore on 12 October 1908 in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. She attended Old Saybrook's public schools, starting at the age of four. In 1931, she earned the PhG degree at the University of Connecticut, and, for more than nine years, worked as a pharmacist in the family-owned drugstores in Old Saybrook and Old Lyme. During these years, she also wrote short stories. These stories remain unpublished.

Following her marriage to George D. Petry in 1938, Ann Petry moved to Harlem, abandoned the family profession, and, for the next eight years, actively pursued a career as a writer. From 1938 to 1941, she worked as a reporter for New York's Amsterdam News. From 1941 to 1944, she was a reporter and also the editor of the woman's page for The People's Voice, where from 1942 to 1943 she wrote about Harlem's upper middle class in the weekly column “The Lighter Side.” During these years, she also enrolled in a writing workshop and a creative writing class at Columbia University. Petry's decision to change her profession to writer was a gamble that paid off. Her first short story, “Marie of the Cabin Club,” a suspense-romance that is set in a Harlem night club, was published in 1939 in the Baltimore newspaper Afro-American. “On Saturday Night the Sirens Sound” (1943), which is also set in Harlem and focuses on children left home alone, was published in the Crisis. This story intrigued an editor at Houghton Mifflin who encouraged Petry to apply for Houghton's fellowship in fiction. Recipients of this fellowship received $2,400 and the publication of their winning work. In 1945, Petry won the fellowship, and in 1946, Houghton Mifflin published The Street, a naturalistic/feminist novel about a mother who tries to provide a better life for herself and her son in an urban environment that foreshadows failure.

Soon after its publication, The Street became a best-seller. Reprinted in 1985 as part of the Black Women Writers series at Beacon Press and reissued in 1992 by Houghton Mifflin, this novel has sold close to two million copies and is hailed universally as a “masterpiece” of African American fiction and a “classic” of urban American realism. Other widely acclaimed works by the writer that also continue to be reprinted or reissued are The Drugstore Cat (1949), her only children's work; The Narrows (1953), a complex novel of psychological realism; Miss Muriel and Other Stories (1971), a collection that presents “well-founded” portrayals of characters in both urban and small town America; and Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad (1955) and Tituba of Salem Village (1964), juvenile works with convincingly human depictions of well-known slaves Harriet Tubman and Tituba Indian.

Outstanding works by Petry but with a smaller audience are Country Place (1947), a novel that examines class and gender within a white New England community; Legends of the Saints (1970), a juvenile work that includes in its documentation of saints an African American; and “The Moses Project” (1988), a short story about house arrest in modern times. Published in anthologies but not bearing Petry's name are five poems that are reminiscent of African American poetry from the 1970s: “Noo York City 1,” “Noo York City 2,” and “Noo York City 3” (1976) and “A Purely Black Stone” and “A Real Boss Black Cat” (1981). Her essays, which cover topics ranging from how to teach students to write creatively to the novel as social criticism, are mostly lectures revised for collections by other writers.

Critics call Petry's style versatile. Her novels, short stories, and poems evolve from her experiences in Harlem and Old Saybrook. History is the basis of her books for adolescents. When describing settings, Petry has an eye for details, and when creating characters, an ear for dialogue. Because of her sensitivity to landscapes and personalities, readers can almost see and feel with her narrators and characters.

Critics also call Petry a visionary and a humanist. In the 1940s and 1950s, long before feminism became ideological, she had created in The Street and The Narrows women who might be characterized as feminists. Long before interracial relationships between men of African descent and white women would become accepted in America, she described a love affair between an African American man and a white woman in The Narrows. Long before African American and white women in the 1960s would enter into dialogue to oppose patriarchy, she had provided in the 1940s such discourses in subtexts within The Street and Country Place.

Recognitions of Petry's aesthetics have also come in the form of honorariums, citations, lectureships at universities, library collections, and numerous translations of her novels, short stories, and juvenile works. In 1946, editor Martha Foley dedicated to Petry the collection The Best American Short Stories, 1946, which also included Petry's short story “Like a Winding Sheet.” That same year, the New York Women's City Club honored her for her contributions to the city as a reporter and novelist; as an organizer of The Negro Women, Incorporated, a consumer watch-group for working-class women in Harlem; as a recreation specialist, particularly for her development of programs for parents and children in problem areas in Harlem; as a writer of skits and programs for children of laundry workers; and as a member of the American Negro Theatre, where during the year 1940 she performed at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture as Tillie Petunia in On Striver's Row. Since the 1970s, Petry has appeared in Who's Who of American Women, Who's Who among Black Americans, and Who's Who in Writers, Editors and Poets. She has received citations from the Greater Women in Connecticut History, the United Nations Association, the city of Philadelphia, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and from literary groups such as the annual Celebration of Black Writing Conference in Philadelphia and the Middle Atlantic Writers Association. She has lectured at Miami University of Ohio and was a visiting professor at the University of Hawaii. She has received honorary degrees from Suffolk University (1983), the University of Connecticut (1988), and Mount Holyoke College (1989). All of her novels, several short stories, and one juvenile work have been translated, together, into at least twelve different languages. Collections of her manuscripts, letters, first editions, and translations have been compiled at Boston University, Yale University, and the Atlanta University Center.

Petry has said often that she wants to be remembered for not only The Street, her most celebrated work, but for everything she has written.

Bibliography

• Theodore L. Gross, “Ann Petry: The Novelist as Social Critic,” in Black Fiction: New Studies in the Afro-American Novel since 1945, ed. A. Robert Lee, 1980, pp. 41–53.
• Trudier Harris, “On Southern and Northern Maids: Geography, Mammies and Militants,” in From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature, 1982, pp. 88–100.
• Gloria Wade-Gayles, “Journeying from Can't to Can and Sometimes Back to ‘Can't,’” in No Crystal Stair: Visions of Race and Sex in Black Women's Fiction, 1984, pp. 148–156.
• Marjorie Pryse, “‘Patterns Against the Sky’: Deism and Motherhood in Ann Petry's The Street,” in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction and Literary Traditions, eds. Majorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers, 1985, pp. 116–131.
• Suzanne Poirier, “From Pharmacist to Novelist,” in Pharmacy in History, 1986, pp. 27–33.
• Gladys J. Washington, “A World Made Cunningly: A Closer Look at Ann Petry's Short Fiction,” CLA Journal 30 (Sept. 1986): 14–29.
• Nellie McKay, introduction to The Narrows, 1988.
• Calvin Hernton, “The Significance of Ann Petry,” in The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers, Adventures in Sex, Literature and Real Life, 1987; rpt. 1990, pp. 59–88.
• Hazel Arnett Ervin, introduction to Ann Petry: A Bio-Bibliography, 1993

Hazel Arnett Ervin

writer

Personal Information

Born October 12, 1909, in Old Saybrook, CT; died after a brief illness, April 28, 1997, in Old Saybrook, CT; daughter of Peter C. (a pharmacist and business owner) and Bertha (a barber, chiropodist and business owner; maiden name, James) Lane; married George David Petry, February 22, 1938; children: Elisabeth.
Education: University of Connecticut, D.Phar., 1934.

Career

Pharmacist at family-owned drugstores in Old Saybrook and Lyme, CT, c. 1934-37; Amsterdam News, New York City, began as advertising salesperson and ad copywriter, c. 1939-40; People's Voice, New York City, news reporter and editor of women's section, c. 1941; taught at the Young Men's Christian Association; member of American Negro Theatre; founded Negro Women Incorporated (a legislative watchdog group), 1941; first short story under own name published in The Crisis, November, 1943; first novel, The Street, published by Houghton Mifflin, 1946.

Life's Work

Ann Petry became the first African American woman to write a best- selling novel. Her 1946 work The Street, a tragic story set on a block in Harlem, earned her comparisons to Native Son author Richard Wright. In their fiction, both writers demonstrated just how difficult it was for an African American to achieve a dignified, moderately prosperous existence, when racism and violence threatened them from all sides. Petry developed her sympathetic views of black urban life from her own experiences living and working in New York City as a newspaper reporter for prominent black news publications in the 1930s and 1940s. She later fled both the city and her literary fame, retreating back to the small New England town that had been home to several generations of her family.

Ann Lane Petry was born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1909. She belonged to one of only a handful of African American families in the posh seaside town, where her father had owned a drugstore since the turn of the century. Petry's grandfather was a chemist, and an aunt and uncle were pharmacists like her father. Her mother was first a chiropodist, then began her own linen business. Petry thus grew up in a pleasant, middle-class atmosphere, and planned to enter the family business. A high school teacher, whom Petry later said did not particularly like her, read Petry's assigned piece of fiction aloud to the class and informed her she possessed the talent to become a writer. But when Petry graduated in 1929, she enrolled in the University of Connecticut, and five years later received her doctorate in pharmacy. For the next few years, she worked as pharmacist at family-owned drugstores in Old Saybrook and Lyme, Connecticut, still harboring the dream of writing for a living. During her spare time she penned short stories.

Ann Lane married George Petry, a writer, in February of 1938, and with her new husband she moved to New York City. Here, far from the quaint towns of the Connecticut shore, she met with her first experiences of just how the majority of African-Americans lived during the era. In 1939 she was hired at the Amsterdam News, an important African American newspaper, as an advertising salesperson and ad copywriter. Within a few years she had moved on to another Harlem-focused paper, the People's Voice, where she was both a news reporter and editor of its women's section. As a street reporter, she saw firsthand the poverty and terrible circumstances under which many African Americans were forced to live, including unsafe, overpriced housing, police who turned a blind eye to crime, sexual harassment, and chronic unemployment. She spent several years as a reporter before leaving to pursue other career options, including studying painting, founding a legislative watchdog group aimed at African American women, writing and acting in productions with the American Negro Theatre, and teaching business writing courses. She also continued to write fiction.

Petry also became involved in an experimental after-school program at P.S. 10, a Harlem elementary school on West 116th Street. It was designed to help latchkey children--children whose mothers worked and whose fathers were often absent, or who worked several jobs. Petry pointed out in her first novel, "White folks haven't liked to give black men jobs that paid enough for them to support their families." These children were forced to spend their after-school hours on their own. Much of what she saw during her involvement with the program-- especially how such children became easy targets for either abuse and recruitment into criminal activity--became the basis for her first novel.

"I had lived my whole life without paying any attention," Petry said of her affluent upbringing in a 1992 New York Times interview with Esther B. Fein. "It wasn't my life. But once I became aware, I couldn't see anything but." The short stories she wrote were now inspired by newspaper clippings, and she met with success when "On Saturday, the Sirens at Noon," appeared in the November 1943 issue of The Crisis. An editor at the publishing house Houghton Mifflin read it and contacted her, inquiring as to whether she was working on a novel. George Petry was serving in the Armed Forces at the time, so Petry took a job writing copy for a wig and hairpiece catalog to put together a nest egg, and a year later she gave Houghton Mifflin an outline and five chapters for The Street. In turn, they gave her a $2400 fellowship to complete it.

When it appeared in early 1946, The Street quickly became the first best-selling novel ever written by an African American woman. Set in Harlem on the very same stretch of West 116th Street as P.S. 10, it follow the tragic story of a single mother, Lutie Johnson, and her eight-year-old son Bub after Lutie's husband leaves her. She is forced to work long hours, and worries constantly about Bub and the dangers he faces on the streets near their apartment. She harbors a dream of becoming a nightclub singer, earning enough money to escape poverty, and some day sending Bub to a prestigious college. Lutie also finds a role model in Benjamin Franklin, the eighteenth-century American inventor and statesman, who demonstrated how success can come through hard work and honest living. Lutie watches as her neighbor prospers in running a brothel out of her apartment. Bub, like most of his Harlem playmates, eventually wanders down the wrong path. "And they should have been playing in wide stretches of green park and instead they were in the street," Petry wrote. "And the street reached out and sucked them up."

The Street sold 1.5 million copies and was an overnight literary sensation. "The Street was a story, not propaganda, wrote Ray Rickman in American Visions decades later, "and it was a truer, more intelligent depiction of Harlem than most previous writers were able to accomplish." After two decades of dreaming, Petry found her new celebrity status difficult. "I was a black woman at a point in time when being a writer was not usual," Petry told Fein in New York Times interview, "and I was besieged. Everyone wanted a part of me." To escape she fled back to Old Saybrook, purchasing a 200-year-old house in 1947.

That same year her second novel, A Country Place, appeared; its plot revolved around a husband who has returned from the war to learn that his wife has committed adultery. Though it also featured non- stereotypical, sympathetic African American protagonists and still tackled socio-economic prejudices, A Country Place achieved nowhere near the success of her debut novel. Arthur P. Davis, writing on Petry in his book From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900 to 1960, placed it "in the tradition of small-town realistic fiction that goes back to [Sinclair Lewis's] Main Street.... A Country Place deals with the class lines between aristocrats and nobodies, the antiforeign, anti-Roman Catholic prejudices, and the sexual looseness and the ugliness and viciousness found behind the innocent-appearing life in a small town."

Petry's third and last novel also shows the distance Petry had put between herself and urban life. Published in 1953, The Narrows featured an interracial relationship, a distinctly risky literary theme for the time. Its African American protagonist, Link Williams, possesses great gifts, including an Ivy League degree, but still faces prejudice. He becomes romantically involved with a white heiress, and he is later found dead. In an essay on Petry for a 1974 issue of Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Thelma J. Shinn wrote that Petry's "first concern ... is for acceptance and realization of individual possibilities--black and white, male and female. Her novels protest against the entire society which would contrive to make any individual less than human, or even less than he can be."

Over the next few decades, Petry led a quiet life in Old Saybrook. She wrote children's books, including Tituba of Salem Village, and Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad, and saw some of her short stories collected into anthologies such as Legends of the Saints, published in 1970. The Street was reissued in 1991, and its story still resonated with contemporary single mothers in Harlem: "That's not fiction: That's my life," one such woman told Fein. Though by this time Petry was a relative unknown, her debut novel's place in African American literature was assured. Essence writer and novelist Veronica Chambers declared that upon her first reading of The Street she was reduced to tears. "And yet I also felt a sense of joy," Chambers wrote. "Petry's writing could do that--encompass a world of characters and emotions with such realism that readers claimed them as their own." The novelist Gloria Naylor, who used to visit her grandparents in Harlem only a few blocks away from West 116th Street, told the New York Times she never forgot the book's first scene-setting sentences, and said that Petry "captured the forces that work against the black female." Petry died in a convalescent home in Old Saybrook in April of 1997.

Awards

Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, 1945, for The Street.

Works

Writings

• The Street, Houghton Mifflin, 1946, reprinted, 1991.
• The Country Place, 1947.
• The Narrows, 1953, Beacon, 1988.
• Miss Muriel and Other Stories, 1971, Beacon, 1989.
• Legends of the Saints (collected short stories), 1970.

Further Reading

Books

• Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale, Volume 1, 1973, Volume 7, 1977, Volume 18, 1981.
• Current Biography, edited by Anna Rothe, H.W. Wilson, 1946.
• Davis, Arthur P., From the Dark Tower: Afro-American Writers 1900 to 1960, Periodicals African American Review, Fall 1992, pp. 495-504.

• American Visions, February 1990, p. 56.
• Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, 1974.
• Essence, August 1997, p. 148.
• New York Times, January 8, 1992; April 30, 1997, p. B9.

— Carol Brennan

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding reliable references. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (June 2006)

Ann Petry (October 12, 1908 – April 28, 1997) was an African American author who became the first black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies for her novel The Street.^[1]

Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Notes 4 References

Early life

Ann Lane was born on October 12, 1908 in Old Saybrook, Connecticut as the youngest of three daughters to Peter Clark Lane and Bertha James Lane in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Her parents belonged to the black minority of the small town. Her father was a pharmacist and her mother was a shop owner, chiropodist, and hairdresser. Ann and her sister were raised "in the classic New England tradition: a study in efficiency, thrift, and utility (…) They were filled with ambitions that they might not have entertained had they lived in a city along with thousands of poor blacks stuck in demeaning jobs."^[2]

The family had none of the trappings of the middle class until Petry was well into adulthood. Before her mother became a businesswoman, she worked in a factory, and her sisters, Ann's aunts, worked as maids. The Lane girls were raised sheltered from most of the disadvantages other black people in the United States had to experience due to the color of their skin; however there were a number of incidents of racial discrimination.^{[citation needed]}

As she wrote in "My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience," published in Negro Digest in 1946, there was an incident where a racist decided that they did not want her on a beach. Her father wrote a letter to The Crisis in 1920 or 1921 complaining about a teacher who refused to teach his daughters and his niece.^{[citation needed]} Another teacher humiliated her by making her read the part of Jupiter, the illiterate ex-slave in the Edgar Allan Poe short story "The Gold-Bug".

Petry had a strong family foundation with well-traveled uncles, who had many stories to tell her when coming home; her father, who overcame racial obstacles, opened a pharmacy in the small town; and her mother and aunts who set a examples to become strong herself. Petry, interviewed by the Washington Post in 1992, says about her tough female family members that “it never occurred to them that there were things they couldn’t do because they were women.”^[3]

Career

The wish to become a professional writer was raised in Ann for the first time in high school when her English teacher read her essay to the class commenting on it with the words: “I honestly believe that you could be a writer if you wanted to.”^[4] The decision to become a pharmacist was her family’s. She enrolled in college and graduated with a Ph.G. degree from Connecticut College of Pharmacy in New Haven in 1931 and worked in the family business for several years. She also began to write short stories while she was working at the pharmacy.

On February 22, 1938, she married George D. Petry of New Iberia, Louisiana, which brought Petry to New York. She not only wrote articles for newspapers such as The Amsterdam News, or The People’s Voice, and published short stories in The Crisis, but also worked at an after-school program at P.S. 10 in Harlem. It was during this period of her life that she had realized and personally experienced what the black population of the United States had to go through in their everyday life.

Traversing the streets of Harlem, living for the first time among large numbers of poor black people, seeing neglected children up close – Petry’s early years in New York inevitably made impressions on her. Impacted by her Harlem experiences, Ann Petry used her creative writing skills to bring this experience to paper. Her daughter Liz explained to the Washington Post that “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.”^{[cite this quote]}

Petry’s most popular novel The Street was published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. With The Street, Petry became the first black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies.^[1]

Back in Old Saybrook in 1947, the writer worked on Country Place (1947), The Narrows (1953), other stories, and books for children, but they have never achieved the same success as her first book. Until her death Petry lived in an 18th century house in her hometown, Old Saybrook. Ann Lane Petry died at the age of 88 on April 28, 1997. She was outlived by her husband, George Petry, who died in 2000, and her only daughter, Liz Petry.

Notes

1. ^ ^{a b} McKay, p. 127
2. ^ Holladay, p. 7
3. ^ Holladay, p. 5
4. ^ Holladay, p. 6

References

• Condon, Garret “Ann Petry,” Hartford Courant Northeast, 8 November 1992
• Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1988.
• Holladay, Hilary (1996). Ann Petry. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 9780805778427. 
• McKay, Nellie. "Ann Petry's The Street and The Narrows: A Study of the Influence of Class, Race, and Gender on Afro-American Women's Lives." Women and War. Ed. Maria Diedrich and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung. New York: Berg, 1990.
• Petry, Elisabeth, ed. Can Anything Beat White? A Black Family’s Letters. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
• “English and the Urban Scene,” speech delivered to Hartford Public High school’s English Department and NDEA Institute of Trinity College, March 6, 1969

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