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Ann Petry (born October 12, 1908, died April 28, 1997) was an African American author. Image File history File links Broom_icon. ... October 12 is the 285th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (286th in leap years). ... 1908 (MCMVIII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday (link will display the full calendar). ... April 28 is the 118th day of the year (119th in leap years) in the Gregorian calendar, with 247 days remaining. ... 1997 (MCMXCVII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... An African American (also Afro-American, Black American, or simply black) is a member of an ethnic group in the United States whose ancestors, usually in predominant part, were indigenous to Africa. ... An author is the person who creates a written work, such as a book, story, article or the like. ...

Ann Lane was born as the younger of the two daughters to Peter and Bertha Clark in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Her parents belonged to the Black minority of the small town. Her father was a pharmacist and her mother was a shop owner, chiropodist, and hairdresser. Ann and her sister were raised Old Saybrook is a town in Middlesex County, Connecticut, United States. ...

“in the classic New England tradition: a study in efficiency, thrift, and utility (…) They were filled with ambitions that they might not have entertained had they lived in a city along with thousands of poor blacks stuck in demeaning jobs.”^{[citation needed]}

The family belonged to the middle-class, and never had to suffer any financial struggles similar to those of many Harlem inhabitants. The Lane girls were raised sheltered from most of the disadvantages other black people in the United States had to experience due to the color of their skin. Only once did Ann experience racial discrimination when she went to school two years early at the age of 4 with her older sister Helen. On their way home, the two sisters were attacked by some white juveniles with stones. After the girls’ uncles took care of this by threatening the wrongdoers the Lane girls were never bothered again.^{[citation needed]} The middle class, in colloquial usage, consists of those people who have a degree of economic independence, but not a great deal of social influence or power. ... For other uses, see Harlem (disambiguation). ... An African-American drinks out of a water fountain marked for colored in 1939 at a street car terminal in Oklahoma City. ...

The strong family bonding was a big support for Ann’s self-esteem. Her well-traveled uncles, who had many stories to tell their nieces when coming home, her ambitious father who overcame racial obstacles when opening his pharmacy in the small town as well as her mother and aunts, set a great example to Ann and Helen to become strong themselves. Petry interviewed by the Washington Post in 1992 says about her tough female family members that “it never occurred to them that there were things they couldn’t do because they were women.” ... 1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday. ...

The wish to become a professional writer was raised in Ann for the first time in high school when her English teacher read her essay to the class commenting on it with the words: “I honestly believe that you could be a writer if you wanted to.”

However, Petry decided on a rather stable education and followed the family tradition after finishing high school. She enrolled in college and graduated with a Ph.G. degree from Connecticut College of Pharmacy in New Haven in 1931 and worked in the family business for several years. This article is about the city in Connecticut. ... 1931 (MCMXXXI) was a common year starting on Thursday (link is to a full 1931 calendar). ...

On February 22, 1938 she married George D. Petry of New Iberia, Louisiana. This new commitment brought Petry to New York and eventually back to writing. She did not only write articles for newspapers like Amsterdam News, or People’s Voice, and published short stories in the Crisis, but was also engaged at an elementary school in Harlem. It was during this period of her life that she had realized and personally experienced what the black population of the United States had to go through in their everyday life. The city of New Iberia is the parish seat of Iberia Parish, in the US state of Louisiana, 125 miles (201 km) west of New Orleans. ... NY redirects here. ... The New York Amsterdam News is a weekly newspaper geared for the African-American community of New York City. ...

Traversing the littered streets of Harlem, living for the first time among large numbers of poor black people, seeing neglected children up close – Petry’s early years in New York inevitably made painful impressions on her. Deeply impacted by her Harlem experiences, Ann Petry was in the possession of the necessary creative writing skills to bring it to paper. Her daughter Liz explains to the Washington Post that “her way of dealing with the problem was to write this book, which maybe was something that people who had grown up in Harlem couldn’t do.” ...

She wrote her most popular novel The Street in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. Back in Old Saybrook in 1947, the writer worked on Country Place (1947), The Narrows (1953), and some other stories but they have never achieved the same success as her first book. Until her death Petry lived in a representative 18th century house in her hometown, Old Saybrook. Ann Lane Petry died in the age of 88 on 28th April 1997. She was outlived by her only daughter, Liz Petry. A novel (from French nouvelle Italian novella, new) is an extended, generally fictional narrative, typically in prose. ... 1946 (MCMXLVI) was a common year starting on Tuesday. ... (17th century - 18th century - 19th century - more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 18th century refers to the century that lasted from 1701 through 1800. ...

Works by Ann Petry

• Like a Winding Sheet (1945);
• The Street (1946);
• Country Place (1947);
• The Drugstore Cat (1949);
• The Narrows (1953);
• Harriet Tubman: Conductor on the Underground Railroad (1955);
• Tituba of Salem Village (1964);
• Legends of the Saints (1970);
• Miss Muriel and Other Stories (1971).