![]() ![]() I was fortunate to discover The Street as an undergraduate student at Spelman College, historically a black women’s college in Atlanta. ![]() ![]() For Petry, 116th Street is the gritty antagonist, representing the intersection of racism, sexism, poverty and human frailty. Instead, Petry set her story in Harlem, but not the “New Negro” centre of racial uplift and progress. Nor did she choose Walden Pond as her muse. This is no novel of manners a la Dorothy West. Ann Petry was a New Englander, yet she didn’t write with the reserve we associate with authors from that region. W hen The Street was published in 1946, African American literature was tacitly understood to be African American male literature and women’s literature was coded as white women’s literature. ![]()
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