The novel opens symbolically in November 1944 with the wind, cold, dirt, and filth of 116th Street overpowering the hurried Harlem pedestrians, including the apartment-hunting protagonist, Lutie Johnson. The Street is a conventional novel of economic determinism in which the environment is the dominant force against which the characters, must struggle to survive. The novels reveal her movement from a naturalistic vision of the big city to a demythologizing of black and white relations in small-town America. Her publications include four children’s books, a collection of short stories, and three novels: The Street, Country Place, and The Narrows. In 1948 she returned to Connecticut to raise her family and continue writing. The early chapters of The Street won her the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1945. Born in 1911 in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, Ann Petry grew up in a predominantly white environment and, in the family tradition, graduated in 1934 with a degree in pharmacy from the University of Connecticut. The setting and themes of Ann Petry’s novels are a natural outgrowth of her intimacy with the black inner-city life of New York and the white small-town life of New England. Considered by many critics to be her finest work, the book relates the struggles of a young, attractive black woman, Lutie Johnson, to achieve the American dream but who is unable to do so because of the dual trappings of race and gender. The book became the first novel by an African American woman to sell over 1 million copies (Temples for Tomorrow). In 1946 Petry’s The Street was published. Although a few denounced the novel because they felt it dwelled upon the sordid and tragic aspects of black life and did not show a more balanced community, most praised the novel’s strongly naturalistic portrait of Harlem.
Much of the existing criticism of Petry’s work centers on her most critically acclaimed and popular novel, The Street, which received generally good reviews by her contemporary commentators.
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