Petry's desire to become a professional writer was raised first in high school when her English teacher read her essay to the class and commented on it with the words: 'I honestly believe that you could be a writer if you wanted to.' The decision to become a pharmacist was her family's. Petry had a strong family foundation with well-traveled uncles, who had many stories to tell her when coming home her father, who overcame racial obstacles, opened a pharmacy in the small town and her mother and aunts set a strong example: Petry, interviewed by The Washington Post in 1992, says about her tough female family members that 'it never occurred to them that there were things they couldn’t do because they were women.' Career Another teacher humiliated her by making her read the part of Jupiter, the illiterate ex-slave in the Edgar Allan Poe short story ' The Gold-Bug'. Her father wrote a letter to The Crisis in 1920 or 1921 complaining about a teacher who refused to teach his daughters and his niece. The Lane girls were raised sheltered from most of the disadvantages that other black people in the United States had to experience due to the color of their skin however there were a number of incidents of racial discrimination.Īs Petry wrote in 'My Most Humiliating Jim Crow Experience', published in Negro Digest in 1946, there was an incident where a racist decided that they did not want her on a beach. Before her mother became a businesswoman, she worked in a factory, and her sisters worked as maids. The family had none of the trappings of the middle class until Petry was well into adulthood.

In 1925, Ann graduated from high school as the only person of Afro-American descent. Īnn and her sister were raised 'in the classic New England tradition: a study in efficiency, thrift, and utility (…) They were filled with ambitions that they might not have entertained had they lived in a city along with thousands of poor blacks stuck in demeaning jobs.' Ann was also the niece of Anna Louise James. Her father was a pharmacist and her mother was a shop owner, chiropodist, and hairdresser. Her parents belonged to the black minority, numbering 15 inhabitants of the small town. She was the youngest of three daughters to Peter Clark Lane and Bertha James Lane. Early life Īnn, born Anna Houston Lane, was born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. In 2019, the Library of America published a volume of her work containing The Street as well as her 1953 masterpiece The Narrows and a few shorter pieces of nonfiction. Her 1946 debut novel The Street became the first novel by an African-American woman to sell more than a million copies.

Ann Petry (Octo– April 28, 1997) was an American writer of novels, short stories, children's books and journalism.

The Street by Ann Petry