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Ann Petry

January 01, 1970

Ann Petry (October 12, 1908 – April 28, 1997) was an American writer of novels, short stories, children's books and journalism. Her 1946 debut novel The Street became the first novel by an African-American woman to sell more than a million copies.[2][3]

Ann Lane Petry
BornAnn Lane Petry
(1908-10-12)October 12, 1908
Old Saybrook, CT, US
DiedApril 28, 1997(1997-04-28) (aged 88)
Old Saybrook, CT, US
Pen nameArnold Petri[1]
OccupationWriter
LanguageEnglish
NationalityAmerican
EducationPh.G.
Alma materConnecticut College of Pharmacy
Years active1946–71
Notable worksThe Street (1946)
The Narrows (1953)
SpouseGeorge Petry
ChildrenLiz Petry
 Literature portal

In 2019, the Library of America published a volume of her work containing The Street as well as her 1953 masterpiece The Narrows and a few shorter pieces of nonfiction.[4]

Early life edit

Ann, born Anna Houston Lane,[5] was born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. She was the youngest of three daughters to Peter Clark Lane and Bertha James Lane. Her parents belonged to the black minority, numbering 15 inhabitants of the small town.[6] Her father was a pharmacist and her mother was a shop owner, chiropodist, and hairdresser. Ann was also the niece of Anna Louise James.[7][8]

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."[9] In 1925, Ann graduated from high school as the only person of Afro-American descent.[10]

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 worked as maids. The Lane girls were raised sheltered from most of the disadvantages that 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.

As Petry 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.[11] 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 set a strong example: 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."[12]

Career edit

Petry's desire to become a professional writer was raised first in high school when her English teacher read her essay to the class and commented on it with the words: "I honestly believe that you could be a writer if you wanted to."[13] The decision to become a pharmacist was her family's. After graduating in 1929 from Old Saybrook High School,[14] she went to college and graduated with a Ph.G. degree from the University of Connecticut College of Pharmacy in New Haven in 1931 and worked in the family business for several years, while also writing short stories. On February 22, 1938, she married George D. Petry of New Iberia, Louisiana, and moved to New York. She worked as a journalist writing articles for newspapers including The Amsterdam News (between 1938 and 1941) and The People's Voice (1941–44),[15] and published short stories in The Crisis, where her first story appeared in 1943,[6] Phylon, and other outlets.[16] Between 1944 and 1946 she studied creative writing at Columbia University.[15] She also worked at an after-school program at P.S. 10 in Harlem. It was during this period that she experienced and understood what the majority of the black population of the United States had to go through in their everyday life. Traversing the Harlem streets, 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 and led her to put her experiences to paper. Her daughter Liz explained to The Washington Post'' that "her way of dealing with the problem was to write this book [The Street], which maybe was something that people who had grown up in Harlem couldn’t do."[17]

Petry's first and most popular novel, The Street, was published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship with book sales exceeding one million copies.[3] She was featured in a brief All-American News film segment covering her winning the award.[18]

Back in Old Saybrook in 1947, Petry worked on Country Place (1947), The Narrows (1953), other stories, and books for children, but they never achieved the same success as her first book. She drew on her personal experiences of the hurricane in Old Saybrook in Country Place. Although the novel is set in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Petry identified the 1938 New England hurricane as the source for the storm that is at the center of her narrative.

Petry was a member of the American Negro Theater and appeared in productions including On Striver's Row.[19] She also lectured at University of California, Berkeley, Miami University and Suffolk University, and was Visiting Professor of English at the University of Hawaii.[20]

She died in Old Saybrook at the age of 88 on April 28, 1997. She was outlived by her husband George, who died in 2000, and her only daughter, Liz Petry.

In November, 2018, Tayari Jones called for a revival of Petry's acclaim, writing that Petry "is the writer we have been waiting for, hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time."[21] In her home state of Connecticut, poet and activist, Jose B. Gonzalez has also led a movement to get Petry more recognition.[22][23]

Selected bibliography edit

  • "Marie of the Cabin Club" (short story), Baltimore Afro-American, 1939. Originally published under the pseudonym Arnold Petri.[24]
  • The Street (novel), Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1946; New York: Pyramid, 1961; Boston: Beacon Press, 1985; London: Michael Joseph, 1947; Ace Books, 1958; Virago, 1988.
  • Country Place (novel), Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947; London: Michael Joseph, 1948; Chatham, NJ: Chatham Bookseller, 1971. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2019.
  • The Drugstore Cat (for children; illus. Susanne Suba), New York: Crowell, 1949; Boston: Beacon, 1988.
  • The Narrows (novel), Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017.
  • Tituba of Salem Village (historical novel for children), 1955, New York: Crowell, 1964; Harper trophy, 1991.
  • Harriet Tubman: Conductor On The Underground Railroad (non-fiction), New York: Crowell, 1955; as The Girl Called Moses: The Story of Harriet Tubman, London: Methuen, 1960.
  • Legends of the Saints (illus. Anne Rockwell), New York: Crowell, 1970.
  • Miss Muriel and Other Stories (story collection), Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2017.

References edit

  1. ^ Reporter, Chronicle. . Archived from the original on December 2, 2020. Retrieved August 14, 2020.
  2. ^ "Ann Petry", AALBC.com.
  3. ^ a b McKay, p. 127.
  4. ^ Sehgal, Parul (April 16, 2019). "Two Novels by Ann Petry, a Writer Who Believed in Art That Delivers a Message". The New York Times. Retrieved May 9, 2019.
  5. ^ "archives.nypl.org -- Ann Petry papers". archives.nypl.org. Retrieved June 13, 2020.
  6. ^ a b Cott, Nancy F., and Kathryn Allamong Jacob, "New Cache of Letters Illuminates Life of African American Novelist Ann Petry" August 15, 2020, at the Wayback Machine, Schlesinger Newsletter, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.
  7. ^ Andrews, Gregory E. (July 1, 1994). "NRHP Inventory-Nomination: James Pharmacy". National Park Service. With accompanying 10 photos, exterior and interior, from 1993 (see photo captions last page of text document).
  8. ^ "National Register Information System". National Register of Historic Places. National Park Service. March 13, 2009.
  9. ^ Holladay, p. 7.
  10. ^ Harris, Trudier, ed. (1988), Afro-American Writers, 1940-1955, Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 76, Detroit: Gale Research Co., p. 141, ISBN 0810345544
  11. ^ Petry, Elisabeth, At Home Inside, p. 27.
  12. ^ Holladay, p. 5.
  13. ^ Holladay, p. 6.
  14. ^ "Ann Lane Petry", Black History Now, July 7, 2014.
  15. ^ a b "Ann Petry", Encyclopædia Britannica.
  16. ^ "Petry, Ann (1908–1997)", Ann Petry Collection, Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center.
  17. ^ Streitfeld, David (February 25, 1992). "PETRY'S BREW: LAUGHTER FURY". The Washington Post. Retrieved April 22, 2017..
  18. ^ "All-American news. [1945-05, no. 4]". Library of Congress.
  19. ^ Atlas, Nava, "Ann Petry", Literary Ladies Guide, April 22, 2015.
  20. ^ Busby, Margaret, "Ann Petry", Daughters of Africa, 1992, p. 229.
  21. ^ Jones, Tayari (February 15, 2018). "In Praise of Ann Petry". The New York Times. No. 15 February 2018. Retrieved November 19, 2018.
  22. ^ "Why you should know about Ann Petry, one of the first major Black woman fiction writers".
  23. ^ "Author Ann Petry gets spotlight at panel discussion in Waterford".
  24. ^ "Ann Petry". FemBio.
Sources
  • Condon, Garret, "Ann Petry", Hartford Courant Northeast, November 8, 1992.
  • Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series, Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1988.
  • Hernton, Calvin (1987). The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers. Anchor Press. ISBN 0-385-23921-1.
  • Holladay, Hilary (1996). Ann Petry. Twayne Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8057-7842-7.
  • 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", in Maria Diedrich and Dorothea Fischer-Hornung (eds), Women and War, New York: Berg, 1990.
  • Petry, Elisabeth (ed.),Can Anything Beat White? A Black Family’s Letters. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.
  • Petry, Elisabeth, At Home Inside: A Daughter's Tribute to Ann Petry. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008. ISBN 978-1604731002
  • "English and the Urban Scene", speech delivered to Hartford Public High School's English Department and NDEA Institute of Trinity College, March 6, 1969.

External links edit

  • Ann Petry papers. Mugar Memorial Library Boston, Massachusetts
  • Ann Petry Manuscripts. Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center
  • Ann Petry Manuscripts. James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

January 01, 1970
petry, october, 1908, april, 1997, american, writer, novels, short, stories, children, books, journalism, 1946, debut, novel, street, became, first, novel, african, american, woman, sell, more, than, million, copies, lane, petrybornann, lane, petry, 1908, octo. Ann Petry October 12 1908 April 28 1997 was an American writer of novels short stories children s books and journalism Her 1946 debut novel The Street became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies 2 3 Ann Lane PetryBornAnn Lane Petry 1908 10 12 October 12 1908Old Saybrook CT USDiedApril 28 1997 1997 04 28 aged 88 Old Saybrook CT USPen nameArnold Petri 1 OccupationWriterLanguageEnglishNationalityAmericanEducationPh G Alma materConnecticut College of PharmacyYears active1946 71Notable worksThe Street 1946 The Narrows 1953 SpouseGeorge PetryChildrenLiz Petry Literature portal In 2019 the Library of America published a volume of her work containing The Street as well as her 1953 masterpiece The Narrows and a few shorter pieces of nonfiction 4 Contents 1 Early life 2 Career 3 Selected bibliography 4 References 5 External linksEarly life editAnn born Anna Houston Lane 5 was born in Old Saybrook Connecticut She was the youngest of three daughters to Peter Clark Lane and Bertha James Lane Her parents belonged to the black minority numbering 15 inhabitants of the small town 6 Her father was a pharmacist and her mother was a shop owner chiropodist and hairdresser Ann was also the niece of Anna Louise James 7 8 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 9 In 1925 Ann graduated from high school as the only person of Afro American descent 10 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 worked as maids The Lane girls were raised sheltered from most of the disadvantages that 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 As Petry 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 11 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 set a strong example 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 12 Career editPetry s desire to become a professional writer was raised first in high school when her English teacher read her essay to the class and commented on it with the words I honestly believe that you could be a writer if you wanted to 13 The decision to become a pharmacist was her family s After graduating in 1929 from Old Saybrook High School 14 she went to college and graduated with a Ph G degree from the University of Connecticut College of Pharmacy in New Haven in 1931 and worked in the family business for several years while also writing short stories On February 22 1938 she married George D Petry of New Iberia Louisiana and moved to New York She worked as a journalist writing articles for newspapers including The Amsterdam News between 1938 and 1941 and The People s Voice 1941 44 15 and published short stories in The Crisis where her first story appeared in 1943 6 Phylon and other outlets 16 Between 1944 and 1946 she studied creative writing at Columbia University 15 She also worked at an after school program at P S 10 in Harlem It was during this period that she experienced and understood what the majority of the black population of the United States had to go through in their everyday life Traversing the Harlem streets 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 and led her to put her experiences to paper Her daughter Liz explained to The Washington Post that her way of dealing with the problem was to write this book The Street which maybe was something that people who had grown up in Harlem couldn t do 17 Petry s first and most popular novel The Street was published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship with book sales exceeding one million copies 3 She was featured in a brief All American News film segment covering her winning the award 18 Back in Old Saybrook in 1947 Petry worked on Country Place 1947 The Narrows 1953 other stories and books for children but they never achieved the same success as her first book She drew on her personal experiences of the hurricane in Old Saybrook in Country Place Although the novel is set in the immediate aftermath of World War II Petry identified the 1938 New England hurricane as the source for the storm that is at the center of her narrative Petry was a member of the American Negro Theater and appeared in productions including On Striver s Row 19 She also lectured at University of California Berkeley Miami University and Suffolk University and was Visiting Professor of English at the University of Hawaii 20 She died in Old Saybrook at the age of 88 on April 28 1997 She was outlived by her husband George who died in 2000 and her only daughter Liz Petry In November 2018 Tayari Jones called for a revival of Petry s acclaim writing that Petry is the writer we have been waiting for hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment while also offering a page turning good time 21 In her home state of Connecticut poet and activist Jose B Gonzalez has also led a movement to get Petry more recognition 22 23 Selected bibliography edit Marie of the Cabin Club short story Baltimore Afro American 1939 Originally published under the pseudonym Arnold Petri 24 The Street novel Boston Houghton Mifflin 1946 New York Pyramid 1961 Boston Beacon Press 1985 London Michael Joseph 1947 Ace Books 1958 Virago 1988 Country Place novel Boston Houghton Mifflin 1947 London Michael Joseph 1948 Chatham NJ Chatham Bookseller 1971 Evanston Northwestern University Press 2019 The Drugstore Cat for children illus Susanne Suba New York Crowell 1949 Boston Beacon 1988 The Narrows novel Boston Houghton Mifflin 1953 Evanston Northwestern University Press 2017 Tituba of Salem Village historical novel for children 1955 New York Crowell 1964 Harper trophy 1991 Harriet Tubman Conductor On The Underground Railroad non fiction New York Crowell 1955 as The Girl Called Moses The Story of Harriet Tubman London Methuen 1960 Legends of the Saints illus Anne Rockwell New York Crowell 1970 Miss Muriel and Other Stories story collection Boston Houghton Mifflin 1971 Evanston Northwestern University Press 2017 References edit Reporter Chronicle Little Known Black History Fact Ann Petry Archived from the original on December 2 2020 Retrieved August 14 2020 Ann Petry AALBC com a b McKay p 127 Sehgal Parul April 16 2019 Two Novels by Ann Petry a Writer Who Believed in Art That Delivers a Message The New York Times Retrieved May 9 2019 archives nypl org Ann Petry papers archives nypl org Retrieved June 13 2020 a b Cott Nancy F and Kathryn Allamong Jacob New Cache of Letters Illuminates Life of African American Novelist Ann Petry Archived August 15 2020 at the Wayback Machine Schlesinger Newsletter Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Harvard University Andrews Gregory E July 1 1994 NRHP Inventory Nomination James Pharmacy National Park Service With accompanying 10 photos exterior and interior from 1993 see photo captions last page of text document National Register Information System National Register of Historic Places National Park Service March 13 2009 Holladay p 7 Harris Trudier ed 1988 Afro American Writers 1940 1955 Dictionary of Literary Biography vol 76 Detroit Gale Research Co p 141 ISBN 0810345544 Petry Elisabeth At Home Inside p 27 Holladay p 5 Holladay p 6 Ann Lane Petry Black History Now July 7 2014 a b Ann Petry Encyclopaedia Britannica Petry Ann 1908 1997 Ann Petry Collection Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center Streitfeld David February 25 1992 PETRY S BREW LAUGHTER FURY The Washington Post Retrieved April 22 2017 All American news 1945 05 no 4 Library of Congress Atlas Nava Ann Petry Literary Ladies Guide April 22 2015 Busby Margaret Ann Petry Daughters of Africa 1992 p 229 Jones Tayari February 15 2018 In Praise of Ann Petry The New York Times No 15 February 2018 Retrieved November 19 2018 Why you should know about Ann Petry one of the first major Black woman fiction writers Author Ann Petry gets spotlight at panel discussion in Waterford Ann Petry FemBio Sources Condon Garret Ann Petry Hartford Courant Northeast November 8 1992 Contemporary Authors Autobiography Series Detroit Gale Research Company 1988 Hernton Calvin 1987 The Sexual Mountain and Black Women Writers Anchor Press ISBN 0 385 23921 1 Holladay Hilary 1996 Ann Petry Twayne Publishers ISBN 978 0 8057 7842 7 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 in Maria Diedrich and Dorothea Fischer Hornung eds Women and War New York Berg 1990 Petry Elisabeth ed Can Anything Beat White A Black Family s Letters Jackson University Press of Mississippi 2005 Petry Elisabeth At Home Inside A Daughter s Tribute to Ann Petry Jackson University Press of Mississippi 2008 ISBN 978 1604731002 English and the Urban Scene speech delivered to Hartford Public High School s English Department and NDEA Institute of Trinity College March 6 1969 External links editAnn Petry papers Mugar Memorial Library Boston Massachusetts Ann Petry Manuscripts Howard Gottlieb Archival Research Center Ann Petry Manuscripts James Weldon Johnson Collection in the Yale Collection of American Literature Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library Retrieved from https en wikipedia org w index php title Ann Petry amp oldid 1221633463, wikipedia, wiki, book, books, library,

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