The Street (Beacon Paperback, 699)

Petry, Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807063576 ISBN 13: 9780807063576

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 1985

As much a historical document as it is a novel, this 1946 winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship is the poignant and unblinkingly honest story of a young black woman's struggle to live and raise her son by herself amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s.

Review:

"A powerful, uncompromising work of social criticism. To this day, few works of fiction have so clearly illuminated the devastating impact of racial injustice." -- Coretta Scott King

"Overflows with the classic pity and terror of good imaginative writing."

"A classic of American realism . . . The Street rushes toward its fatalistic climax like a train toward a washed-out bridge."

"A major literary invention . . . A truly great book." The Los Angeles Times
"Overflows with the classic pity and terror of good imaginative writing." The New York Times
"A powerful, uncompromising work of social criticism. To this day, few works of fiction have so clearly illuminated the devastating impact of racial injustice." -- Coretta Scott King
"A classic of American realism . . . The Street rushes toward its fatalistic climax like a train toward a washed-out bridge." Newsday

About the Author:

Ann Petry (1908-1997), novelist, short story writer, and writer of books for young people, was one of America's most distinguished authors. Ann began by studying pharmacology, and in 1934, received her Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of Connecticut College of Pharmacy. She worked as a registered pharmacist in Old Saybrook and in Lyme, and during these years wrote several short stories. When she married George David Petry in 1938, the course of her life changed. They lived in New York City, and Ann went to work for the Harlem Amsterdam News. By 1941, she was covering general news stories and editing the women's pages of the People's Voice in Harlem. Her first published story appeared in 1943 in the Crisis, a magazine published monthly by the NAACP. Subsequent to that, she began work on her first novel, The Street, which was published in 1946 and for which she received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. Petry wrote two more novels, The Country Place and The Narrows, and numerous short stories, articles and children's books.