Ann Petry

Ann Petry (born October 12, 1908 in Old Saybrook , Connecticut , † April 28, 1997 ibid) was an American writer whose work can be assigned to the so-called Afro - American literature . Although it has a completely independent oeuvre, many critics count it mainly to the school of Richard Wright .

Life

Ann Petry was born Ann Lane in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, where her family was and would remain the only black family in the entire town for many years, giving it a particularly privileged position compared to the rest of the black population in the southern states or major cities of the north underlines. Her family, like the generations before Ann, were successful pharmacists (her father was licensed in 1880, as were an aunt and uncle). So Ann grew up quite sheltered as she experienced neither racial nor gender discrimination and her family was quite wealthy.

First, Ann Petry followed the family tradition and graduated from the University of Connecticut's pharmaceutical faculty in 1931 . She then worked in the family's pharmacies for about seven years. However, even then she showed literary ambitions. She married in 1938 and moved to New York , where she was confronted for the first time with the poverty and violence of the black population and their exploitation in the wake of the Great Depression . She worked for two Harlem newspapers, Amsterdam News and People's Voice . In order to be able to present these experiences in literary form, Petry attended courses at Columbia University . Her first stories appeared in various magazines in the 1940s, as did her first novels, which, although highly praised, were always overshadowed by Wright's works. In 1948 she returned to Connecticut, where she raised a family, worked with teenagers, and continued to write books.

Ann Petry was included in the Daughters of Africa anthology published in 1992 by Margaret Busby in London and New York.

Works (selection)

• Country Place . Chatham Books, Chatham, NJ 1971 (reprinted from Boston, Mass. 1947).
• Harriet Tubman . Conductor on the underground railroad . 8th ed. Pocket Books, New York 1975, ISBN 0-671-50442-8 (former title: The girl named Moses ).
• Link and Camilo ("The Narrows"). Propylaea Publishing House, Berlin 1956.
• Miss Muriel and Other Stories Beacon Press, Boston, Mass. 1995, ISBN 0-8070-8311-9 (reprinted from the Boston edition, Mass. 1971).
• The street. Roman ("The Street"). Ullstein, Frankfurt / M. 1982, ISBN 3-548-30130-4 (The woman in literature). New translation by Uda Strätling, Nagel & Kimche, Munich 2020, ISBN 978-3-312-01160-5 .
• Titubo of Salem village . Crowell Publ., New York 1964.

literature

• Hilary Holladay: Ann Petry . Twayne Publ., New York 1996, ISBN 0-8057-7842-X .
• Alex Lubin: Revising the blueprint. Ann Petry and the literary left . University Press, Jackson, Miss. 2007, ISBN 978-1-57806-971-2 .
• Nellie Y. McKay: Ann Petry's The Street and The Narrows. A Study of the Influence of Class, Race, and Gender on Afro-American Women's Lives . In: Maria Diedrich, Dorothea Fischer-Hornung (Ed.): Women and War. The Changing Status of American Women from the 1930s to the 1950s . Berg Books, New York 1990, ISBN 0-85496-648-X , pp. 127-140.
• Elisabeth Petry: At home inside. A daughter's tribute to Ann Petry . University Press, Jackson, Miss. 2009, ISBN 978-1-604-73100-2 .
• Majorie Pryse, Hortense J. Spillers (Eds.): Conjuring. Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition . Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Ind. 1985, ISBN 0-253-20360-0 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Ann Petry in the catalog of the German National Library
• FemBiography Ann Petry