Like a Winding Sheet

Ann Petry was born on October 12, 1911, in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, to a middle-class family. In the late 1930s, Petry held an apprenticeship as a journalist for two Harlem newspapers, The Amsterdam and The People’s Voice. This work exposed her to life in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, which, at the time, was marked by poverty, crime, violence, and economic exploitation. The Harlem setting became highly significant to many of Petry’s works including her novel The Street and multiple short stories in Miss Murial and Other Stories. Petry’s first published short story appeared in The Baltimore Afro-American in 1939, but her literary life changed after the publication of her short story “On Saturday the Siren Sounds at Noon” in the December 1943 edition of Crisis. Crisis was a key literary magazine for African American voices and was the official publication for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). After her short story appeared in Crisis, an editor from the publishing house Houghton-Mifflin asked her to submit a novel for their literary fellowship award, which sparked Petry’s career as a novelist. Petry’s first novel, The Street, was the first novel written by an African American woman to sell over one million copies.