A nn Petry was the author of novels, short stories, poems, essays, and books for children and young people. Her first enormously successful and prize-winning novel, THE STREET, link was published in 1946 and has rarely been out of print since. It tells the story of an African American woman struggling to raise a child alone in Harlem. Ann called it a “sad and terrible truth” that with the addition of guns and drugs, she could have written the same story again fifty years later.
Born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut in 1908, Anna Houston Lane was the daughter of the town’s only pharmacist. Peter Clark Lane was the first African American to receive a pharmacy license from the state of Connecticut. Peter (a model for the narrator of COUNTRY PLACE) and his relatives, as well as her mother Bertha James Lane’s brothers and sisters, provided endless source material for THE NARROWS and MISS MURIEL AND OTHER STORIES.

Ann was already writing when she finished Old Saybrook High School. She continued to write during pharmacy school and while she worked at the family’s drugstores in Old Saybrook and Old Lyme. She began to publish her short stories after she married George David Petry, a native of New Iberia, Louisiana, and moved to New York City, where he had lived since boyhood.

Once THE STREET proved a resounding success, Ann returned to Old Saybrook where she bought an eighteenth-century farmhouse. She and George lived there for the rest of their lives.

Ann continued to write publishing among other works the highly praised biographies for young adults, HARRIET TUBMAN: Conductor on the Underground Railroad and TITUBA OF SALEM VILLAGE. And as she wrote, she raised a daughter (see Aboutliz), cared for her elderly relatives, worked as substitute pharmacist in the family’s drugstores and became an officer in the Authors League and the Authors Guild. Among countless civic activities she served on church committees, and on the Old Saybrook Board of Education and its high school building committee.

A year as a visiting professor of English at the University of Hawaii in 1974 launched growing recognition of her work in academia. The acknowledgements included honorary doctoral degrees from Suffolk University, the University of Connecticut, and Mount Holyoke and Trinity colleges. She was the subject of “ANN PETRY’S LIFE AND ART: Piercing the Stereotypes,” a 1982 doctoral thesis by Diane Isaacs.

After she returned from Hawaii, Ann wrote essays and poems and lectured at colleges and universities throughout the Northeast, most notably delivering the annual Richard Wright Lecture at Yale University in 1982.

Ann died in 1997, but the accolades have continued. She was one of the women to whom the state dedicated the Connecticut Register and Manual in 1999. And in 2001, Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts inducted her into its Hall of Black Achievement.

Readers all over the world continue to enjoy her works.

For more information about Ann, refer to CONTEMPORARY AUTHORS Autobiography Series, Volume 6.