Miss Muriel and Other Stories
by Ann Petry
A young black girl watches as her aunt’s multiple suitors disrupt her family’s privacy. The same girl, now on the cusp of adulthood, shares her family’s growing fears that her father has disappeared. Acclaimed author Ann Petry penned these and the other unforgettable narratives in Miss Muriel and Other Stories more than seventy years ago, yet in them contemporary readers recognize characters who exist today and dilemmas that recur again and again: the reluctance of African Americans to seek help from the police, the rage that erupts in a black man worn down by brutality, the tyranny that the young can visit on their elders regardless of race. Originally published between 1945 and 1971, Petry’s stories capture the essence of African American experience since the 1940s.
FictionAfrican American & BlackWomen
RELEASED2017
PUBLISHERNorthwestern University Press
LENGTH319
LANGUAGEEN
Ann Lane was born on October 12, 1908 in Old Saybrook, Connecticut as the youngest of three daughters to Peter Clark Lane and Bertha James Lane 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 "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." On February 22, 1938, she married George D. Petry of New Iberia, Louisiana, which brought Petry to New York. She not only wrote articles for newspapers such as The Amsterdam News, or The People’s Voice, and published short stories in The Crisis, but also worked at an after-school program at P.S. 10 in Harlem. Traversing the 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 impressions on her. Impacted by her Harlem experiences, Ann Petry used her creative writing skills to bring this experience to paper. Her daughter Liz explained 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.” Petry’s most popular novel The Street was published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. With The Street, Petry became the first black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies.
Miss Muriel and Other Stories
by Ann Petry
A young black girl watches as her aunt’s multiple suitors disrupt her family’s privacy. The same girl, now on the cusp of adulthood, shares her family’s growing fears that her father has disappeared. Acclaimed author Ann Petry penned these and the other unforgettable narratives in Miss Muriel and Other Stories more than seventy years ago, yet in them contemporary readers recognize characters who exist today and dilemmas that recur again and again: the reluctance of African Americans to seek help from the police, the rage that erupts in a black man worn down by brutality, the tyranny that the young can visit on their elders regardless of race. Originally published between 1945 and 1971, Petry’s stories capture the essence of African American experience since the 1940s.
FictionAfrican American & BlackWomen
RELEASED2017
PUBLISHERNorthwestern University Press
LENGTH319
LANGUAGEEN
Ann Lane was born on October 12, 1908 in Old Saybrook, Connecticut as the youngest of three daughters to Peter Clark Lane and Bertha James Lane 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 "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." On February 22, 1938, she married George D. Petry of New Iberia, Louisiana, which brought Petry to New York. She not only wrote articles for newspapers such as The Amsterdam News, or The People’s Voice, and published short stories in The Crisis, but also worked at an after-school program at P.S. 10 in Harlem. Traversing the 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 impressions on her. Impacted by her Harlem experiences, Ann Petry used her creative writing skills to bring this experience to paper. Her daughter Liz explained 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.” Petry’s most popular novel The Street was published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. With The Street, Petry became the first black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies.
