Ann Petry: The Street, The Narrows

Ann Petry: The Street, The Narrows

$35.00

Brilliant, daring, and ahead of her time, Ann Petry (1908–1997) is one of the unsung American writers of the last century. Born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, and trained in the family business as a pharmacist, she moved to Harlem in 1938 and began working for the radical newspaper The People’s Voice. The pervasive poverty and racism she witnessed there inspired her unforgettable debut novel, The Street, published in 1946.

A work of crackling intensity, The Street is told in the voice of Lutie Johnson, a single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street quickly became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.

Faced with newfound fame and unwanted literary celebrity, Petry returned to the relative quiet of Connecticut to write her most ambitious novel, the 1953 masterpiece The Narrows. Set in industrial, waterfront Connecticut, The Narrows is a wide-ranging social novel, intricately layered and stylistically daring, with a rich vein of humor, inimitably quirky minor characters, and keenly observed historical textures. At its provocative center is an interracial love affair between Link Williams, a young black scholar-athlete and war veteran, and Camilo Sheffield, a white fashion reporter and munitions heiress. Their attraction sets in motion a tragedy that reveals the bitter fault lines of race and class in America.

Both novels, as Coretta Scott King once said of The Street, are “uncompromising work[s] of social criticism” that reveal “the devastating impact of racial injustice.” They are also impossible to put down: full of characters, to borrow Petry’s words, “as real as one’s next-door-neighbor, predictable and yet unpredictable, lingering in the memory,” in situations as powerfully pertinent today as when they were first written.

This Library of America edition gathers Petry’s two greatest works in one volume for the first time, along with a selection of her never-before-reprinted essays on the art of fiction and the vibrant Harlem life that inspired her. Authoritative notes and a newly researched chronology of Petry’s life, prepared by editor Farah Jasmine Griffin with the assistance of the author’s daughter Elisabeth Petry, illuminate the biographical and historical contexts.

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