In one volume, two landmark novels about the terrible power of race in America from one of the foremost African American writers of the past century.
Her father a pharmacist and her mother a hairdresser and
shopkeeper, Ann Petry (1908-1997) graduated from the Connecticut
College of Pharmacy and returned to her Old Saybrook, Connecticut,
home town to work in the family pharmacy. Marrying in 1938, she
moved to New York City, where she wrote for The Amsterdam News and
The People's Voice, performed with the American Negro Theatre,
studied art, and began to publish short stories. Her critically
acclaimed first novel, The Street (1946), became the first book by
an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.
Returning to Old Saybrook to raise her daughter, she went on to
write the novels Country Place (1947) and The Narrows (1953), Miss
Muriel and Other Stories (1971), the young adult historical novels
Tituba of Salem Village (1955) and Harriet Tubman- Conductor on the
Underground Railroad (1955), and other works.
Farah Jasmine Griffin, William B. Ransford Professor of English,
Comparative Literature, and African-American Studies at Columbia
University, has written extensively about Ann Petry, most recently
in Harlem Nocturne- Women Artists and Progressive Politics During
World War II (2013).
"Petry will always feel on time. Her kind of talent will
always feel startling and sui generis: The music of her sentences,
and their discipline; her unerring sense of psychology; the
fullness with which she endows each character, which must be
understood as a kind of love; the plots that commandeer whole hours
and days. . . . Her work endures not only because it
illuminates reality, but because it harnesses the power of fiction
to supplant it." — Parul Sehgal, The New York
Times
“Newly reissued, Ann Petry’s novels The
Street and The Narrows are masterpieces of social
realism ... this reissue makes clear that her writing transcends
comparisons. It’s volatile but exacting, heartbreaking but often
brutally funny. Labels don’t stick to it.” — Sam
Sacks, The Wall Street Journal
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