Ann Petry

The First Black Female Novelist to Sell One Million Copies

Portrait of Ann Petry against a Harlem, New York backdrop.

Ann Petry quit her job at the pharmacy owned by her family and left her small Connecticut town to pursue a writing career in New York City in 1938. She became a member of the American Negro Theater and wrote children’s plays. After publishing short stories and working as a journalist for Amsterdam News and the Harlem-based People’s Voice, Ann took a creative writing course at Columbia University. One of the short stories she published led to a $2,400 Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship to write her first novel, The Street. The book is a window into mid-century street culture and black struggle, as seen through the eyes of its protagonist, Lutie Johnson. It became the first novel by a black American female author to sell over one million copies.

Ann Petry was born Ann Lane in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, on October 12, 1908. Her parents were Peter Clark Lane, a pharmacist, and Bertha James Lane, who owned Beautiful Linens for Beautiful Homes, which produced hand-embroidered linens. Ann had an older sister named Helen. The Lanes were one of two black families in Old Saybrook. Ann’s mother, Bertha, was a Connecticut native, born in Hartford, as was her maternal grandmother, Anna Houston James. Anna James was born in New Haven, and she married Ann’s grandfather, William Samuel James, who escaped enslavement in Virginia via the Underground Railroad before settling in Connecticut. Ann’s father, Peter Lane, was a transplant from Germantown, New Jersey, who opened a drug store in Old Saybrook in 1902. 

Ann Petry grew up surrounded by strong, independent women who defied the times by making various successes in business. In addition to owning a linen store, her mother was also a licensed barber, hairdresser, and chiropodist (she treated people who suffered ailments in the lower limbs). Ann’s maternal aunt, Anna Louise James, completed college by the time she was born and opened a drug store in Hartford before taking over Peter Lane’s pharmacy in Old Saybrook. Ann followed in the footsteps of her father and aunt by attending the Connecticut College of Pharmacy in New Haven (now the University of Connecticut School of Pharmacy in Storrs), where she earned a degree. From 1931, she worked in the two drugstores until she met and married George D. Petry, who moved to Connecticut from New Iberia, Louisiana.

A Harlem street in 1938.

During this time, Ann began writing short stories. Weary of pharmaceutical work, Ann sought a career change. In 1938, the couple moved to Harlem, New York, where she tried to become a writer. Despite the country being in the middle of the Great Depression, Ann secured a job the year they moved. She found work at Amsterdam News selling advertising space. She also wrote for the paper. In 1941, Harlem rival the People’s Voice—owned by Adam Clayton Powell Jr.—hired her to do reporting and serve as editor of the woman’s page. Ann’s exposure to politically active blacks, labor leaders, community activists, artists, and accomplished writers fueled her writing.

Her first story, “Marie of the Cabin Club,” was purchased by the Afro-American in Baltimore, Maryland, and published under the pseudonym Arnold Petri in 1939. Her real name appeared in print four years later when “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon” ran in the Crisis, a magazine published by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The story earned her twenty dollars and garnered attention from an editor at Houghton Mifflin, the Boston-based publishing company.

The editor liked Ann’s writing so much he encouraged her to write a novel and enter it in an upcoming Houghton Mifflin literary competition. It was 1944. Her husband had shipped off to Europe to fight in the war, and her employment at the People’s Voice ended. That allotted her time to start such a project. While she missed him terribly and hoped for his continued safety abroad, his military stipend helped support her. In addition, she earned supplemental income working as a part-time typist and writing copy for a catalog company.

Ann entered the literary competition by submitting a synopsis of the new novel, titled The Street, long with five initial chapters in December 1944. In the end, Houghton Mifflin awarded her a $2,400 fellowship for her entry the following year, which sustained her as she completed the book. Houghton Mifflin published The Street in January 1946. The novel received wide acclaim and sold one and a half million copies. The book was translated into several languages in paperback editions and led to Ann being featured on magazine covers and in various articles. She became a literary celebrity.

Portrait of Elisabeth Petry, the only child of George and Ann Petry.

The one daughter born to Ann and George in 1949, Elisabeth, wrote a memoir, At Home Inside: A Daughter's Tribute to Ann Petry, detailing her mother’s personal life drawn from memory as well as Ann’s thirty-three journals. Elaborating on the unwelcomed celebrity Ann experienced with the success of The Street, Elisabeth revealed: 

Mother wrote and spoke extensively about fleeing to New York after the publicity surrounding publication of The Street began to interfere with her writing. She said the day in 1945 that Ed Sullivan mentioned the book in his newspaper column her telephone rang all day long. Her public appearances made her feel as though she was being impaled in front of an audience." 

Of this, Ann admitted: 

“I didn’t feel like being pursued, and questioned, and all the rest of it—flashbulbs, cameras, oooh! The most valuable asset a writer has during his (her) career is anonymity.”

The sudden fame that resulted—which prompted journalists to pry into her private life—caused her to retreat to the safety and obscurity of her family resort town, Old Saybrook, in 1947. Ann wrote three more short stories in the interim, all of which she published between 1944 and 1945. Ann bundled the three stories with ten others in a 1971 short story collection. Ann followed the success of The Street with a second novel, Country Place, in 1947, which was less successful and well-received. But it won some rave reviews for its stark portrayal of small-town corruption and the betrayal of a homecoming war veteran by his wife. Some have characterized Country Place as a “white life” novel, including it in the group of books written in the post-World War II era by black writers who centered their stories on white protagonists. Yet it belongs to the canon of literary works by black American writers.

Ann Petry’s writing career spanned more than half a century and bestowed upon her many honors. Except for the brief decade she spent in New York City, Ann resided in her beloved Old Saybrook for seventy-nine of the eighty-nine years she existed on earth. She died in Old Saybrook on April 28, 1997, at 88 years old.

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