The Street
by Ann Petry
Summary
Lutie Johnson, a single Black mother recently separated from her unfaithful husband, moves with her young son Bub into a cramped apartment on a Harlem street during the Second World War, believing that hard work and thrift, the same values Benjamin Franklin preached, can still carry her toward a decent life. Petry surrounds her almost immediately with men determined to use her: Jones, the building's superintendent, who develops an obsessive, threatening fixation on her; Junto, a white bar owner who quietly controls much of the block from behind the scenes; and Boots Smith, a bandleader who dangles a singing job in front of Lutie while expecting sex in return for it. Desperate for legal fees after Jones manipulates Bub into a mail theft scheme that lands the boy in juvenile custody, Lutie goes to Boots for money, and when he tries to force himself on her in her own apartment, she beats him to death with a candlestick in a single, uncontrollable eruption of everything the street has done to her. She takes what cash he has on him and flees to Chicago alone, leaving Bub behind in the custody of the courts, having lost, in trying to save him, the one thing she came to New York to protect.
Petry writes in a close, controlled naturalist style, closer to Richard Wright's Native Son than to anything softer, tracking exactly how each of the street's daily pressures, rent, racism, an unsafe apartment, a predatory landlord's agent, narrows Lutie's choices until almost none are left. It reads with real momentum once Lutie's crisis begins compounding, and the ending offers no relief, only the clear sighted sense that Lutie has been failed by nearly every system meant to protect her.
Petry had worked as a journalist and a pharmacist before turning to fiction, and she drew on real reporting from Harlem's welfare offices and courts in shaping the novel's detail. Houghton Mifflin published the book in 1946, and Petry became, by most accounts, the first Black woman to sell over a million copies of a single novel.
Historical Context & Significance
Petry won a real prize before The Street existed as a finished book: the opening chapters earned her the 1945 Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, a $2,400 advance against royalties awarded to support an unfinished manuscript the publisher believed in, and that money let her complete the novel. The completed book was eligible for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction the following year, but the 1947 prize went to Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men instead, a novel of Southern political corruption that has kept a far larger place in the American literary canon than Petry's has, despite The Street's own sales far outpacing most Pulitzer winners of its decade.
The novel was widely and favorably reviewed on release, frequently compared to Native Son for its unsparing look at how racism and poverty together crush an individual life, and it was translated into French, Spanish, Japanese, and Portuguese in the years that followed. Its reputation dipped for decades after Petry's death in 1997 before a critical revival brought it back into university courses and reissued paperback editions as one of the founding texts of postwar Black women's fiction.