Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature

Extract

For her critically acclaimed The Street ( 1946 ), Ann Petry became the first African American woman to pen a bestselling novel. Having sold over 2 million copies to date, Petry's debut novel has also defined somewhat narrowly a writing career that spanned over 40 years and encompassed fiction, short stories, literary criticism, and children's literature. Petry stated her desire to be remembered for all of her work. Doing so uncovers a writer who strayed from genre conventions while adhering to her conviction in literature's usefulness as a tool of social criticism. Born October 12, 1908 in the middle-class town of Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Ann Lane earned a PhG from the Connecticut College of Pharmacy and managed her family's drugstore. Her marriage to mystery writer George Petry took her to New York, where she pursued a writing career. While working for the Amsterdam News and the People's Voice , Ann Petry, under the pseudonym Arnold Petri, published her first short story, “Marie of the Cabin Club” (1939), in the Baltimore Afro-American. The story's affinities with the typically male crime genre may account for Petry's nom de plume. The potential gender impropriety associated with crime fiction did not deter Petry from attaching her name to the noir-like “On Saturday, the Siren Sounds at Noon” (1943), her story published in the NAACP's The Crisis that caught the attention ... log in or subscribe to read full text