Ann Petry (1908-1997), novelist and writer of short stories and books for young people, was one of America's most distinguished authors. Her first published story appeared in 1943 in the Crisis. She then began on her first novel, The Street, which was published in 1946 and for which she received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. Petry wrote two more novels, The Country Place and The Narrows, and numerous short stories, articles and children's books.

The Street is my favorite type of novel, literary with an astonishing plot . . . Petry engages the issues of her day, which sadly are the issues of our day as well . . . I just can't figure out why this work is not more widely read and celebrated . . . Sometimes when a writer is regarded as "before her time" we don't quite understand that the same work is still right on time. Petry is the writer we have been waiting for, hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose