Ann Lane was born on October 12, 1908 in Old Saybrook, Connecticut as the youngest of three daughters to Peter Clark Lane and Bertha James Lane in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Her parents belonged to the black minority of the small town. Her father was a pharmacist and her mother was a shop owner, chiropodist, and hairdresser. Ann 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."
On February 22, 1938, she married George D. Petry of New Iberia, Louisiana, which brought Petry to New York. She not only wrote articles for newspapers such as The Amsterdam News, or The People’s Voice, and published short stories in The Crisis, but also worked at an after-school program at P.S. 10 in Harlem. Traversing the streets of Harlem, living for the first time among large numbers of poor black people, seeing neglected children up close – Petry’s early years in New York inevitably made impressions on her. Impacted by her Harlem experiences, Ann Petry used her creative writing skills to bring this experience to paper. Her daughter Liz explained to the Washington Post that “her way of dealing with the problem was to write this book, which maybe was something that people who had grown up in Harlem couldn’t do.”
Petry’s most popular novel The Street was published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. With The Street, Petry became the first black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies.
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Subjects
Fiction, Children's fiction, Juvenile literature, Anglo-Saxons, Drama, History, Juvenile audience, Juvenile fiction, Mystery and detective stories, Private investigators, Women, amorality, aristocracy, detective fiction, locked-room mysteries, Abolitionists, Adultery, African American women, African American women abolitionists, African Americans, African americans, biography, African americans, biography, juvenile literature, African americans, fiction, Afro-Americans, AmericanPlaces
Calcutta, England, India, Surrey, Chênière Caminada, Grand Isle, Gulf of Mexico, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mexico, New Orleans, New York City, Salem, United StatesPeople
Grimesby Roylott, Helen Stoner, John H. Watson, Sherlock Holmes, Stroke Moran, Adèle Ratignolle, Alcée Arobin, Alphonse Ratignolle, Beaudelet, Doctor Mandelet, Edna Pontellier, Ellen Joe, Etienne Pontellier, Farival twins, Gouvernail, Harriet Tubman (1820?-1913), Harriet Tubman (1821-1913), Harriet Tubman (1822-1913), James Highcamp, Léonce Pontellier, Madame Aline Lebrun, Madame Antoine, Madame Pontellier, Mademoiselle Reisz, MariequitaTime
19th centuryID Numbers
- OLID: OL21241A
- ISNI: 0000000114367004
- VIAF: 2489917
- Wikidata: Q448736
- Inventaire.io: wd:Q448736
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Alternative names
- Ann Petry
- Ann (Lane) Petry
- Ann Lane XZO Petry
April 3, 2022 | Edited by JeneeWhitney | Edited without comment. |
April 1, 2022 | Edited by JeneeWhitney | merge authors |
April 1, 2022 | Edited by JeneeWhitney | Edited without comment. |
September 11, 2008 | Edited by RenameBot | fix author name |
April 1, 2008 | Created by an anonymous user | initial import |