Name: The Street Audiobook
Brand: Urban Audiobooks
Availability: InStock
Rating: 4.00 (1647 reviews)
Author: Ann Petry
ISBN: 9781470880514

About the Author

Ann Petry (1908–1997) was an American author who became the first African American woman writer with book sales topping a million copies for her novel The Street. She first studied pharmacy, and upon receiving her PhG in 1931, she worked as a pharmacist in her family’s drugstores in Old Saybrook and Old Lyme, Connecticut. During these years she wrote several short stories. When she married George David Petry in 1938, the course of her life changed. They moved to New York, and Ann wrote articles for Harlem’s Amsterdam News. By 1941 she was covering general news stories and editing the women’s pages of the People’s Voice in Harlem. Her first published story appeared in 1943 in the Crisis, a magazine published monthly by the NAACP. Afterward she began work on her first novel—The Street, published in 1946—for which she received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. She wrote two more novels, The Country Place and The Narrows, and numerous short stories, articles, and children’s books. She was also appointed visiting professor of English at the University of Hawaii and lectured widely throughout the United States.

Quotes & Awards

“A powerful, uncompromising work of social criticism. To this day, few works of fiction have so clearly illuminated the devastating impact of racial injustice.”

Coretta Scott King, American author, activist, and civil rights leader
“A classic of American realism…The Street rushes toward its fatalistic climax like a train toward a washed-out bridge.”

Newsday
“Overflows with the classic pity and terror of good imaginative writing.”

New York Times
“A major literary invention…A truly great book.”

Los Angeles Times
“Years ago Ann Petry brought the world to its feet with the artistry…in this painfully honest and wrenching novel. Once again a standing ovation is due for this American classic.”

Gloria Naylor