Petry's first novel follows Lutie Johnson, a young Black single mother in wartime Harlem, who has taken her son Bub to a tenement on 116th Street and is determined to work, save and lift them out of it. Lutie has absorbed Benjamin Franklin's gospel of industry and thrift — from Franklin's autobiography, from an immigrant shopkeeper, and from the wealthy white family she served — and believes the formula must work for her too. The street answers otherwise. She is watched by a predatory neighbour, stalked by her building's superintendent, and cultivated as a prize by Junto, the building's owner, who also controls the club where she hopes to sing her way to better wages. Written in a naturalistic mode often linked to Richard Wright, but centred on a working-class Black woman in a way American fiction had rarely done, the novel shows racism, sexism and class closing every exit Lutie tries. It won a Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, became the first novel by a Black woman to sell more than a million copies, and has remained in print ever since.
Author: Ann Petry · Original publisher: Houghton Mifflin Company (Boston), 1946
