Lists celebrating 20th century Black women writers sometimes miss a crucial figure in literary history. Novelist Ann Petry, an Old Saybrook, Connecticut, native born to a middle-class family on October 12, 1908, was a touchstone of Black literature in the post-World War II period. She was notably the first Black American woman writer to sell more than one million copies of a novel, with her 1946 novel The Street, which follows protagonist Lutie Johnson, a single, working-class Black mother navigating Harlem in the 1940s, pursuing upward mobility, and attempting to leave her career as a domestic worker behind.

Though Petry is best known for The Street and the novel The Narrows (1953), her journey to becoming an influential writer was not direct. Though at least one teacher in her life was impressed with the promise of Petry’s writing abilities, Petry first attended pharmacy school in Connecticut and pursued being a pharmacist as a career, following in her father’s footsteps. During her free time, Petry refined her writing by crafting stories that would go unpublished. In 1938, Petry moved to New York with her husband, George, and became a journalist, writing for The Amsterdam News and The People’s Voice, a politically progressive Harlem-based newspaper founded by the local politician Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Petry’s work at The People’s Voice was varied and expansive, with everything from a gossip column to hard-hitting investigative pieces that centered the injustices and struggles faced by the people of Harlem, all written while Petry edited the women’s section of the paper. Petry’s short stories would eventually find homes first in The Crisis, the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). One particular story, “On Saturday, the Siren Sounds at Noon,” led to Petry applying for and winning a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship to complete the novel that would become The Street.

Literary critic and historian Dr. Lawrence P. Jackson writes in The Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934-1960 that Petry was “a persistent social reformer” and “had an early knack for revealing the environmentally grounded predicaments that addled Black life in Harlem.”

While she attended writing classes at Columbia University, Petry cultivated a keen eye for social injustice. As Dr. Taylor Byas, a recent creative writing Ph.D. graduate of the University of Cincinnati, says about Petry’s impact on the literary world, “I think that is a Black woman writer’s superpower: the way that we pay attention to the world around us and how we can translate that onto the page.” Byas, the author of the debut poetry collection I Done Clicked My Heels Three Times, argues that Petry’s attention to detail is one of reasons she returns to Petry’s work. During our interview, Byas read an excerpt from The Street that captures the artistry of the small details of Petry’s word choices and language that hints at larger themes of violence, assault, and intrusion that are some of the main concerns that Lutie experiences.

“There was a cold November wind blowing through 116th Street,” the passage from The Street’s first page begins. “It did everything it could to discourage the people walking along the street. … The wind lifted Lutie Johnson’s hair away from the back of her neck so that she felt suddenly naked and bald, for her hair had been resting softly and warmly against her skin. She shivered as the cold fingers of the wind touched the back of her neck, explored the sides of her head.” Even from the first page, Petry is interested in what it means for Black women to experience unwanted touch or sensation, how everything violates Lutie, even something as innocuous as wind. “Her novel,” Byas says, “is a really gorgeous example of speaking to the oppression of society, of our environment, the realities of those oppressions, the lack of a happy ending … but speaking to it artfully.”

For those who study Black women’s literature, Petry’s work offers unique insights that were ahead of its time. “What people appreciate about [The Street] today,” says Dr. M. Lynn Weiss, an associate professor of English and American Studies at William & Mary, “is that it really anticipated the criticism and the critical framework that is intersectionality, which we use routinely today in talking about women.” Intersectionality, a term coined by legal theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw in the late 1980s, gives a name to the particular experiences of those who sit at the intersection of multiple marginalizations. Though Crenshaw was the one who came up with the word, Black women writers and thinkers throughout the ages had long considered the unique set of oppressions they faced as both Black people and women, and we can look as far back as abolitionist and activist Sojourner Truth’s 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech as proof. Lutie Johnson embodies these concerns, and her unique set of struggles and the care with which they are tended to in The Street are part of the reason that, across the board, scholars have found Petry’s writing timeless.

Petry wrote around the same time as Black literary giants Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin, authors of Native Son, Invisible Man, and Go Tell It on the Mountain, respectively. She also took up elements of protest in her writing that many associate with Wright, though not necessarily because of Wright but more because of her innate sensitivity to injustice.

Dr. Deborah E. McDowell, the Alice Griffin Professor of English at the University of Virginia, argues that part of the reason Petry’s work languished was that it was overshadowed by these male writers, and that this is in fact the plight of many Black women authors. “You could substitute many other names for Ann Petry and come up with similar conclusions,” Dr. McDowell says. “Women whose literary achievements are credible but whose careers have been eclipsed largely by men, and eclipsed in a way that is structural because the eclipsing isn’t just accidental. It’s: What do people notice? And what do they write about?”​

Black scholars, particularly Black women scholars and critics like Dr. McDowell, have also done their best to make sure Petry’s work — which not only consists of novels and essays but also short stories and children’s books about historical figures such as Harriet Tubman and Tituba, the Black witch of Salem — is not lost to time.

McDowell was responsible for seeing Petry’s work republished during her editorship of a Beacon Press series to reprint Black women’s literary work in the 1980s. At the time, McDowell was attempting to teach courses on Black women writers and found that the texts she wanted to teach were largely out of print or excessively expensive. Taking matters into her own hands, McDowell began the series with reprints of Petry’s novels. Additionally, Dr. Farah Jasmine Griffin, the William B. Ransford Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, edited the Ann Petry Library of America volume in 2019. Weiss cites Griffin’s work in particular as one catalyst for the contemporary resurgence of scholarly articles we are beginning to see surrounding Ann Petry and her writing.

Petry’s work continues to be a source of inspiration and provocation for this generation of writers and scholars. Kristen Reynolds, a fiction writer and American studies Ph.D. candidate at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, finds herself returning to Petry in her own work. Reynolds laments that Petry is an understudied literary figure and solidly positions the writing Petry does as comparable to acclaimed Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison — particularly in her attention to capturing not only the Black woman’s experience but whiteness and questions of racelessness as well. The Narrows, Petry’s 1953 novel, follows the ill-fated love affair between a white socialite and a Black man from the titular part of town and showcases more of Petry’s eye for social dynamics and power, as well as the ramifications of both. McDowell notes that if we ignore the novels and stories of Petry that are often characterized as “raceless,” then “they lose sight of the diversity within Petry’s corpus.”

Petry’s work also takes on the particular limitations of motherhood’s responsibilities seriously. Byas considers Petry’s writing, along with that of the Harlem Renaissance’s Nella Larsen and Jessie Redmon Fauset, to be neo-slave narratives, stories that emerged primarily after World War II that grappled with the aftermath and complicated histories of slavery and often question dominant narratives that emerged during that time. The goal is always the escape, the flight, but for Black women in these contemporary versions, “the women at the center have these double flights where they sort of escape somewhere once and they have to escape again,” Byas argues. “Which I think speaks to the real difficulty of the female slave and how flight was not always as easy for her as the male slave, who was less attached to the children and the things that had to be taken care of.” In The Street, Petry wrestles with these ideas as she writes an ending where Lutie flees Harlem without her son, leaving readers to wonder why and how she makes this decision. But with this weighty choice, Petry humanizes Lutie as both a mother and a person.

In 2008, Elisabeth Petry, Petry’s daughter, penned the memoir At Home Inside: A Daughter’s Tribute to Ann Petry and spoke of her mother with a deep fondness and respect. Elisabeth Petry, who passed early this year, painted a stunning image of her mother in her memoir as a thoughtful homemaker, seamstress, pastry chef, and collector of treasures.

Petry found the fame that The Street brought her distasteful and retreated from the bustle of her Harlem writer’s life soon after its publication and settled in to her private home life in Connecticut with gusto. In 1997, Petry died at age 88, but her writing, and the choices she makes in it, remains vivid for us today. As Reynolds says, “I want that to be part of Petry’s legacy: thinking about and writing about Black women who choose themselves in a world that always wants us to sacrifice everything for everybody else.”

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Ravynn K. Stringfield is a writer and scholar based in Virginia. She holds a doctorate in American studies from William & Mary, where she studied Black women and girls in new media fantasy narratives, and is currently a visiting assistant professor of media studies at the University of Richmond. Stringfield’s debut young adult novel, Love Requires Chocolate, will be published by Joy Revolution, an imprint of Random House, in summer 2024. Her second YA novel, Love in 280 Characters or Less, is forthcoming from Macmillan’s Feiwel & Friends in winter 2025.

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