Ann Petry was born in 1908 in Old
Saybrook, Connecticut, where her father, Peter Lane,
had opened a pharmacy in 1902. Her family was one
of the few black families in the white, shoreline
community. Like her father and several members of
her mother's family, Petry went to college and studied
pharmacy. After graduating from the College of Pharmacy
at the University of Connecticut, she went to work
at her father's store. She also continued to pursue
her ambition to become a writer, a dream she had
harbored since high school. In 1938, she married
George Petry, a 
Louisiana-born
resident of Harlem, whom she had met during a visit
to Hartford. Her life changed dramatically after
she and George moved to Harlem. There she secured
a job writing advertising copy for the influential
black newspaper The Amsterdam News and later
worked as a reporter and editor of the women's pages
of the People's Voice, a rabble-rousing weekly
newspaper founded by Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., the
future Congressman from Harlem. This work led to
her deep immersion in Harlem life. During the period
1938 to 1944, Petry also considerably sharpened
her literary skills, taking courses at Columbia
University and publishing her stories in The
Crisis, the journal of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People; Opportunity,
the magazine of the Urban League; and other periodicals.
One of her stories published in The Crisis,
"On Saturday, the Sirens at Noon," attracted the
attention of an editor at Houghton-Mifflin, winning
her a $2,500 Houghton-Mifflin literary award and
a contract for the novel that would become The
Street. The story of Lutie Johnson, a young,
single black woman who is determined to create a
dignified life for herself and her son in Harlem,
The Street was published to critical and
popular acclaim in 1946. A runaway success, it sold
1.5 million copies-the first novel by a black woman
to have achieved this distinction-and secured Petry's
literary reputation. During the following year,
she also distinguished herself as a writer of short
fiction, winning critical accolades for her story,
"Like A Winding Sheet," which was published in Best
American Short Stories of 1946. She followed
the success of The Street with two other novels,
Country Place (1947), and The Narrows
(1953)-neither of which enjoyed the critical or
popular recognition of The Street.
The financial success of The Street
provided Petry and her husband the financial means
to purchase a 200-year-old house in Old Saybrook,
where they returned in 1948.
Petry continued to write. By then
a mother of a daughter, Elisabeth, she began to
turn out books for children and young adults: The
Drugstore Cat (1949), Harriet Tubman: Conductor
on the Underground Railroad (1955), and Tituba
of Salem Village (1964). She also published
a collection of her short stories, Legends of
the Saints (1970), and another collection, Miss
Muriel and Other Stories (1971). The reissue
of The Street in the mid 1980s triggered
off another round of critical acclaim by a new generation
of readers and renewed attention by academics. When
Petry died in a convalescent center near her Old
Saybrook home in 1997, she was widely regarded as
a pioneering figure in twentieth-century African-American
writing. -James A. Miller
Photograph courtesy of Boston University
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