Mantle Yearbook. He also received an Emmy nom-
ination for Joey (1956) and the Black Filmmakers
Hall of Fame Award, as a pioneer in the film indus-
try (1975). In 1993, Peterson retired from Stony
Brook; he continued writing for the next five years,
cowriting a musical with musician and composer
Ken Lauber. He died of lung cancer on April 27,
1998, in New York.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Abramson, Doris E. Negro Playwrights in the Ameri-
can Theatre, 1925–1959. New York: Columbia
University Press, 1969.
“Peterson, Louis.” In Contemporary Black American
Playwrights and Their Plays, edited by Bernard L.
Peterson, Jr., 381–382. Westport, Conn.: Green-
wood, 1988.
Turner, Darwin T., ed. Black Drama in America.
Greenwich, Conn: Fawcett Publication, 1971.
Loretta Gilchrist Woodard
Petry, Ann (1908–1997)
A novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet, and
author of children’s and young adult works, Ann
Petry was born on October 12, 1908, in Old Say-
brook, Connecticut, to Peter and Bertha Lane, the
only African-American family in this white New
England town at the turn of the 20th century.
Her father, Peter Clark Lane, was a pharmacist
who owned drugstores in Old Saybrook and in
the nearby town of Old Lyme. Her mother, Ber-
tha James Lane, was a chiropodist and the founder
and owner of a linen and embroidery business.
For their two daughters, the Lanes provided what
Ann, their youngest, called a “warm, rich, and
life-sustaining environment,” filled with books,
music, storytelling, travel, and festive celebrations
of birthdays and holidays. Like her father, Ann
became a pharmacist and worked in the family-
owned drugstore in Old Saybrook. Privately, how-
ever, Ann, who began reading at age four, desired
also to write and publish short stories.
In 1938, Ann married George Petry of New
Iberia, Louisiana. They moved to Harlem, where
she abandoned her inherited profession and pur-
sued her dream to become a writer. To prepare
herself, between 1938 and 1942, Petry studied
creative writing with Mabel Louise Robinson,
professor of English at Columbia University, who
suggested that she study plays. Petry also studied
paintings of landscapes. To gain further experi-
ence, Petry worked as a reporter and editor for
various newspapers from 1938 to 1944, including
the Amsterdam News and People’s Voice, where she
edited the woman’s page, and contributed weekly
to her column, “The Lighter Side.” Petry pub-
lished her first short story, “Marie of the Cabin
Club” (1939), under the pseudonym Arnold Petri,
in Baltimore’s Afro-American. Set in Harlem, this
suspense-romance is often eclipsed by “On Sat-
urday the Siren Sounds at Noon” (1943), which
was published in The CRISIS under her real name.
Petry was invited to apply to the 10th annual
Houghton Mifflin Literary Contest by an editor
who had read the Crisis short story. She entered
five chapters of her work-in-progress and won in
the fiction category, receiving an award of $2,400
and the chance to publish her first novel, The
STREET (1946).
A prolific writer, Petry is the author of three
novels: The Street, a classic of urban American
realism; Country Place (1947), a novel of man-
ners that examines class and gender within an
all-white New England community; and The
Narrows (1953), a complex novel of psycho-
logical realism. Of Petry’s 16 short stories, 13
were published in Miss Muriel and Other Stories
(1971). She is also the author of The Drugstore
Cat (1949), a children’s story; she created con-
vincing human depictions of well-known slaves
in Harriet Tubman; Conductor on the Under-
ground Railroad (1955) and Tituba of Salem Vil-
lage (1964), and of less-known saints in Legends
of the Saints (1970) for juvenile readers. Petry’s
works have been translated into at least 12 lan-
guages. She also wrote essays and poetry, includ-
ing the essays “The Novel as Social Criticism”
(1950) and “The Common Ground” (1965) and
the poems “Noo York City 1,” “Noo York City 2,”
and “Noo York City 3” (1976); however, these
works were often anthologized under titles that
do not bear Petry’s name.412 Petry, Ann