Download or read book Ann Petry s Short Fiction written by Hazel A. Ervin and published by Praeger. This book was released on 2004-05-30 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of critical essays is the first work to examine the short stories of Ann Petry, a noted African American writer. While best known for her best-selling debut novel, The Street, the focus of this text is her equally important, but less familiar, volume of short stories Miss Muriel and Other Stories. Within Ann Petry's Short Fiction: Critical Essays, contributors from a variety of disciplines, from literary studies to philosophy, analyze and comment on stories such as Mother Africa, In Darkness and Confusion, and The Witness. Organized into three parts, the first section provides an overview of Petry's short fiction from different theoretical perspectives. In the following two segments, essays are arranged in chronological order, beginning with Petry's work from the 1940s. Contributors discuss her portrayal of characters and conflict as well as thematic threads that run through Petry's work. Taken together, these 14 essays constitute an invaluable companion to Petry's work. This illuminating collection will interest scholars of literature, history, and culture, as well as anyone interested in the fiction of Ann Petry.

Download or read book The Street written by Ann Petry and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2013-08-23 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION FROM NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLING AUTHOR TAYARI JONES “How can a novel’s social criticism be so unflinching and clear, yet its plot moves like a house on fire? I am tempted to describe Petry as a magician for the many ways that The Street amazes, but this description cheapens her talent . . . Petry is a gifted artist.” — Tayari Jones, from the Introduction The Street follows the spirited Lutie Johnson, a newly single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn in 1940s Harlem. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, The Street became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.

Download or read book The Narrows written by Ann Petry and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2017-07-15 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Link Williams is a handsome and brilliant Dartmouth graduate who tends bar due to the lack of better opportunities for an African American man in a staid mid-century Connecticut town. The routine of Link’s life is interrupted when he intervenes to save a woman from a late-night attack. Drinking in a bar together after the incident, “Camilo” discovers that her rescuer is African American and he learns that she is white. Unbeknownst to him, “Camilo” (actually Camilla Treadway Sheffield) is a wealthy married woman who has crossed the town’s racial divide to relieve the tedium of her life. Thus brought together by chance, Link and Camilla draw each other into furtive encounters that violate the rigid and uncompromising social codes of their own town and times. As The Narrows sweeps ahead to its shattering denouement, Petry shines a harsh yet richly truthful light on the deforming harm that race and class wreak on human lives. In a fascinating introduction to this new edition, Keith Clark discusses the prescience with which Petry chronicled the ways tabloid journalism, smug elitism, and mob mentality distort and demonize African American men.

Download or read book The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry written by Keith Clark and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In his in-depth analysis of the works of Ann Petry (1908--1997), Keith Clark moves beyond assessments of Petry as a major mid-twentieth-century African American author and the sole female member of the "Wright School of Social Protest." He focuses on her innovative approaches to gender performance, sexuality, and literary technique. Engaging a variety of disciplinary frameworks, including gothic criticism, masculinity and gender studies, queer theory, and psychoanalytic theory, Clark offers fresh readings of Petry's three novels and collection of short stories. He explores, for example, Petry's use of terror in The Street, where both blacks and whites appear physically and psychically monstrous. He identifies the use of dark comedy and the macabre in the stories "The Bones of Louella Brown" and "The Witness." Petry's overlooked second novel, Country Place -- set in a deceptively serene Connecticut hamlet -- camouflages a world as nightmarish as the Harlem of her previous work. While confirming the black feminist dimensions of Petry's writing, Clark also assesses the writer's representations of an array of black and white masculine behaviors -- some socially sanctioned, others taboo -- in her unheralded masterpiece The Narrows and her widely anthologized short story "Like a Winding Sheet." Expansive in scope, The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry analyzes Petry's unique concerns and agile techniques, situating her among more celebrated male contemporary writers.

Download or read book Tituba of Salem Village written by Ann Petry and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Young readers “will be carried along by the sheer excitement of the story” of 17th-century slavery and witchcraft by the million-copy selling author (The New York Times). In 1688, Tituba and her husband, John, are sold to a Boston minister and sent to the strange world of Salem, Massachusetts. Rumors about witches are spreading like wildfire throughout the state, filling the heads of Salem’s superstitious, God-fearing residents. When the reverend’s suggestible young daughter, Betsey, starts having fits, the townsfolk declare it to be the devil’s work. Suspicion falls on Tituba, who can read fortunes and spin flax into thread so fine it seems like magic. When suspicion turns to hatred, Tituba finds herself in grave danger. Will she be judged guilty of witchcraft and hanged? Loosely based on accounts of the period and trial transcripts, Ann Petry’s compelling historical novel draws readers into the hysteria of America’s deadly witch hunts.

Download or read book At Home Inside written by Elisabeth Petry and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ann Petry (1908-1997) was a prominent writer during a period in which few black writers were published with regularity in America. Her novels The Street, Country Place, and The Narrows, along with a collection of short stories and various essays and works of nonfiction, give voice to black experience outside of the traditional strains of poverty and black nationalism. At Home Inside: A Daughter's Tribute to Ann Petry sifts the myriad contradictions of Ann Petry's life from a daughter's vantage. Ann Petry hoarded antiques but destroyed many of her journals. She wrote, but, failing to publish for years, she used her imagination to design and sew clothes, to bake, and to garden. When fame finally came, Ann Petry did not enjoy the travel it brought. Though she suffered phobias and anxieties all her life, she did not avoid the obligations of literary success until late in her career. Ann Petry applied her formidable skills to stories she told about herself and her family, and the corrections Elisabeth Petry makes to her mother's inventions will prove invaluable. Talking about her life publicly, Ann Petry acknowledged six different birth dates. She hid her first marriage, and even represented her father, Peter C. Lane, Jr., as a potential killer. Mining Petry's journals Elisabeth Petry creates part biography, part love letter, and part sounding of her mother's genius and luminescent personality. Elisabeth Petry is a freelance writer with a juris doctor from the University of Pennsylvania. She lives in Middletown, Connecticut, and is the editor of Can Anything Beat White? A Black Family's Letters (University Press of Mississippi).

Download or read book Harriet Tubman written by Ann Petry and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 137 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Outstanding Book for young adult readers, this biography of the famed Underground Railroad abolitionist is a lesson in valor and justice. Born into slavery, Harriet Tubman knew the thirst for freedom. Inspired by rumors of an “underground railroad” that carried slaves to liberation, she dreamed of escaping the nightmarish existence of the Southern plantations and choosing a life of her own making. But after she finally did escape, Tubman made a decision born of profound courage and moral conviction: to go back and help those she’d left behind. As an activist on the Underground Railroad, a series of safe houses running from South to North and eventually into Canada, Tubman delivered more than three hundred souls to freedom. She became an insidious threat to the Southern establishment—and a symbol of hope to slaves everywhere. In this “well-written and moving life of the ‘Moses of her people’’’ (The Horn Book), an acclaimed author makes vivid and accessible the life of a national hero, soon to be immortalized on the twenty-dollar bill. This intimate portrait follows Tubman on her journey from bondage to freedom, from childhood to the frontlines of the abolition movement and even the Civil War. In addition to being named a New York Times Outstanding Book, Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad was also selected as an American Library Association Notable Book.

Download or read book The Street written by Ann Petry and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2019-12-17 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FROM A BESTSELLING AUTHOR With a new introduction by TAYARI JONES, author of An American Marriage 'The prose is clear, the plot is page-turning, the characters are utterly believable' CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE 'The first book by a black woman to sell more than a million copies' NEW YORK TIMES 'My favourite type of novel, literary with an astonishing plot' TAYARI JONES New York City, 1940s. In a crumbling tenement in Harlem, Lutie Johnson is determined to build a new life for herself and her eight-year-old boy, Bub - a life that she can be proud of. Having left her unreliable husband, Lutie believes that with hard work and resolve, she can begin again; she has faith in the American dream. But in her struggle to earn money and raise her son amid the violence, poverty and racial dissonance of her surroundings, Lutie is soon trapped: she is a woman alone, 'too good-looking to be decent', with predators at every turn.

Download or read book The Black Poets written by Dudley Randall and published by Bantam. This book was released on 1985-04-01 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The claim of The Black Poets to being... an anthology is that it presents the full range of Black-American poetry, from the slave songs to the present day. It is important that folk poetry be included because it is the root and inspiration of later, literary poetry. Not only does this book present the full range of Black poetry, but it presents most poets in depths, and in some cases presents aspects of a poet neglected or overlooked before. Gwendolyn Brooks is represented not only by poems on racial and domestic themes, but is revealed as a writer of superb love lyrics. Tuming away from White models and retuming to their roots has freed Black poets to create a new poetry. This book records their progress."--from the Introduction by Dudley Randall

Download or read book Country Place written by Ann Petry and published by Northwestern University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally published in 1947, Ann Petry’s classic Country Place depicts a predominantly white community disillusioned by the indignities and corruption of small-town life. Johnnie Roane returns from four years of military service in World War II to his wife, Glory. They had been married just a year when he left Lennox, Connecticut, where both their families live and work. In his taxi ride home, Johnnie receives foreboding hints that all has not been well in his absence. Eager to mend his fraying marriage, Johnnie attempts to cajole Glory to recommit to their life together. But something sinister has taken place during the intervening years—an infidelity that has not gone unnoticed in the superficially placid New England town. Accompanied by a new foreword from Farah Jasmine Griffin on the enduring legacy of Petry’s oeuvre, Country Place complicates and builds on the legacy of a literary celebrity and one of the foremost African American writers of her time.

Download or read book Can Anything Beat White written by Farah Jasmine Griffin and published by . This book was released on 2012-04-19 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A treasure trove of correspondence among novelist Ann Petry's ancestors Ann Petry (1908-1997) achieved prominence during a period in which few black women were published with regularity in America. Her novels Country Place (1947) and The Narrows (1988), along with various short stories and nonfiction, poignantly described the struggles and triumphs of middle-class blacks living in primarily white communities. Petry's ancestors, the James family, served as in-spiration for much of her fiction. This collection of more than four hundred family letters, edited by the daughter of Ann Petry, is an engaging portrait of black family life from the 1890s to the early twentieth century, a period not often documented by African American voices. Ann Petry's maternal grandfather, Willis Samuel James, was a slave taught by his children to read and write. He believed "the best place for the negro is as near the white man as he can get." He followed that "truth," working as coachman for a Connecticut governor and buying a house in a white neighborhood in Hartford. Willis had sixteen children by three wives. The letters in this collection are from him and his second wife, Anna E. Houston James, and five of Anna's children, of whom novelist Ann Petry's mother, Bertha James Lane, was the oldest. History is made and remade by the availability of new documents, sources, and interpretations. Can Anything Beat White? contributes a great deal to this process. The experiences of the James family as documented in their letters challenge both representations of black people at the turn of the century

Download or read book Country Place written by Ann Lane Petry and published by . This book was released on 1948 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry written by Keith Clark and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2013-06-03 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This welcome study delivers a long-overdue analysis of the works of Ann Petry (1908–1997), a major mid-twentieth-century African American author. Primarily known as the sole female member of the “Wright School of Social Protest,” Petry has been most recognized for her 1946 novel The Street, about a woman’s struggle to raise her son in a hardscrabble Harlem neighborhood. Keith Clark moves beyond assessments of Petry as a sort of literary descendent of Richard Wright to acclaim her innovative approaches to gender performance, sexuality, and literary technique. Engaging a variety of disciplinary frameworks, including gothic criticism, masculinity and gender studies, queer theory, and psychoanalytic theory, Clark offers fresh readings of Petry’s three novels and collection of short stories. Clark explores, for example, Petry’s use of terror in The Street, where both blacks and whites appear physically and psychically monstrous. He also identifies the use of dark comedy and the macabre in her startling depictions of race, class, gender construction, and sexual identity in the stories “The Bones of Louella Brown” and “The Witness.” Petry’s overlooked second novel, Country Place—set in a deceptively serene, bucolic Connecticut hamlet—camouflages a world as palsied and nightmarish as the Harlem of her previous work. While confirming the black feminist dimensions of Petry’s writing, Clark also assesses the writer’s representations of an array of black and white masculine behaviors—some socially sanctioned, others transgressive and taboo—in her unheralded masterpiece, The Narrows, and her widely anthologized short story, “Like a Winding Sheet.” Expansive in scope, The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry foregrounds and analyzes Petry’s unique concerns and agile techniques, re-introducing and situating her among more celebrated male contemporaries.

Download or read book Ann Petry The Street The Narrows LOA 314 written by Ann Petry and published by Library of America. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 821 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In one volume, two landmark novels about the terrible power of race in America from one of the foremost African American writers of the past century. Ann Petry is increasingly recognized as one of the essential American novelists of the twentieth century. Now, she joins the Library of America series with this deluxe hardcover volume gathering her two greatest works. Published in 1946 to widespread critical and popular acclaim--it was the first novel by an African-American woman to sell over a million copies--The Street follows Lutie Johnson, a young, newly single mother, as she struggles to make a better life for her son, Bub. An intimate account of the aspirations and challenges of black, female, working-class life, much of it set on a single block in Harlem, the novel exposes structural inequalities in American society while telling a complex human story, as overpriced housing, lack of opportunity, sexual harassment, and racism conspire to limit Lutie's potential and to break her buoyant spirit. Less widely read than her blockbuster debut and still underappreciated, The Narrows (1953) is Petry's most ambitious and accomplished novel--a multi-layered, stylistically innovative exploration of themes of race, class, sexuality, gender, and power in postwar America. Centered around an adulterous interracial affair in a small Connecticut town between the young black scholar-athlete Link Williams and white, privileged munitions heiress Camilo Sheffield, it is also a fond, incisive community portrait, full of unforgettable minor characters, unexpected humor, and a rich sense of history. Also included in the volume are three of Petry's previously uncollected essays related to the novels and a newly researched chronology of the author's life, prepared with the assistance of her daughter Elisabeth Petry. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Download or read book The Drugstore Cat written by Ann Petry and published by . This book was released on 1949 with total page 87 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Narrows written by Ann Petry and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2020-01-09 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: BY THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF THE STREET With a new introduction by Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie 'Petry is the writer we have been waiting for, hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment . . . insightful, prescient and unputdownable . . . The Narrows is the story of an interracial romance that proves that passion and prejudice are not mutually exclusive' Tayari Jones It's Saturday, past midnight, and thick fog rolls in from the river like smoke. Link Williams is standing on the dock when he hears quick footsteps approaching, and the gasp of a woman too terrified to scream. After chasing off her pursuer, he takes the woman to a nearby bar to calm her nerves, and as they enter, it's as if the oxygen has left the room: they, and the other patrons, see in the dim light that he's Black and she's white. Link is a brilliant Dartmouth graduate, former athlete and soldier who, because of the lack of opportunities available to him, tends bar; Camilo is a wealthy, married heiress who has crossed the town's racial divide to relieve the tedium of her privileged life. Brought together by chance, Link and Camilo draw each other into furtive encounters that violate the rigid and uncompromising social codes of their times. 'Petry will always feel on time. Her kind of talent will always feel startling and sui generis. . . . Her work endures not only because it illuminates reality, but because it harnesses the power of fiction to supplant it' Parul Seghal, New York Times 'The Street and The Narrows are masterpieces of social realism . . . . [Petry's] writing transcends comparisons. It's volatile but exacting, heartbreaking but often brutally funny. Labels don't stick to it' Wall Street Journal

Download or read book The Critical Response to Ann Petry written by Hazel Arnett Ervin and published by Praeger Publishers. This book was released on 2005 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ervin has brought together 16 reviews and 26 essays that chronicle the literary reception of Ann Petry and her three novels in America from 1946 to the present. Collectively and individually, all of the reviews and essays gauge the historical, cultural, social, political, literary aesthetic, and theoretical depths of Petry's novels. While specific essays will offer overviews of Petry's life and works, others will name literary influences, explore and evaluate her style and structure, identify her aesthetic positions as a writer and novelist, and define her positions in larger discussions of the male and female in general and the African American female in particular. Teachers, students, critics, and others will appreciate this volume. Select reviews and essays provide an overview of Petry's life and works, style, and literary position as a novelist, while other reviews and essays present her as a writer of community, cultural traditions, literary traditions, and characters. As a social critic, she speaks for the voiceless and the maligned; her criticism is sympathic, yet frank and honest. She speaks to and for men and women, rich and poor, young and old.