It’s the birthday of two African American female authors, Ann Petry (1908-1997) and Alice Childress (1916-1994), both of whom broke new literary ground in their own ways.

Petry was born Ann Lane and raised in Old Saybrook, a small town in Connecticut, where her father was a pharmacist and ran his own pharmacy; in fact, both sides of Petry’s family were lousy with pharmacists (there’s your idiom for the day), and she herself studied pharmacy at the University of Connecticut and then worked for her father. But after marrying George Petry in 1938, she settled with her husband in Harlem and ended up writing the first major novel about Harlem, The Street (1946). The Street tells the tragic story of Lutie Johnson and her little boy Bub as they try to negotiate the brutal poverty and racism rife in 1940s Harlem. The novel was critically acclaimed and sold 1.5 million copies, and a quick look at Goodreads affirms that is continues to be widely read and to affect readers powerfully today. (One reader, after explaining why she believes Petry to be a superior writer to Richard Wright, does complain about the “noticeable lack of unicorns” in the novel. I love these people on Goodreads.) Petry did so well financially from book sales that she and her husband were able to move back to Old Saybrook, where they lived in a 200-year-old sea captain’s house. Petry died at 88 and was survived by her husband and daughter.

Childress was born in Charleston, South Carolina, grew up in Harlem with her grandmother, was an actress for the American Negro Theatre, and wrote the first play by a black woman to be produced in New York (Gold through the Trees, 1952). In 1972 she became the first black woman to direct an off-Broadway play, Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White; the play was about an interracial relationship in Charleston during WWI. But to some, Childress is best known as the author of the YA classic, A Hero Ain’t Nothing but a Sandwich (1973), about a 13-year-old heroin addict named Benjie. Childress lived in Manhattan at the time of her death from cancer and was survived by her husband and granddaughter.

 

 

Have a Friday lousy with good books and good friends and stay ever scrupulously honest to the data.