Ann Petry (1908–1997)
From Ann Petry: The Street, The Narrows
Last month the latest addition to the Library of America series was published: a volume collecting Ann Petry’s two great novels, The Street and The Narrows.
Since its publication seventy-three years ago, The Street has sold upwards of two million copies in more than a dozen languages. Both novels were acclaimed by her contemporaries and are still admired and extolled by scholars and critics. Two of Petry’s books for young readers, Tituba of Salem Village and Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad, charmed a whole generation of schoolchildren—and the Tubman biography remains popular and in print to this day.
Yet Ann Petry never became a household name. This may be in part because of her adverse reaction to the sudden fame that greeted her with the unexpected success of The Street. Overwhelmed, she and her husband fled to her hometown in Connecticut and lived in relative seclusion for the rest of their lives. For half a century she continued to write, but limited her public appearances, interviews, and promotional activities.
Two decades after her death, interest in her writings is on the rise yet again. “What can be done to ignite an Ann Petry revival?” Tayari Jones recently asked in a New York Times article. “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.”
To help along this “revival,” we present as our Story of the Week selection a short (and never reprinted) article about Harlem Petry wrote for a travel magazine in 1949.
