Ann Petry

Ann Petry (October 12, 1908 – April 28, 1997) was an American writer of novels, short stories, children's books and journalism. Her 1946 debut novel The Street became the first novel by an African-American woman to sell more than a million copies."In 2019, the Library of America published “The Street” in one volume along with Petry’s 1953 masterpiece, “The Narrows,” and a sampling of her critical writing, edited by Farah Jasmine Griffin, a professor of English and African American Literature at Columbia University and the author of “Harlem Nocturne,” a group biography of radical women artists in the 1940s, including Petry", notes the New York Times.