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The Swinging Light

Keep The Light On

Ann Lane Petry

Author

Ann Lane Petry

1908 – 28 Apr 1997

Ann Lane was born on October 12, 1908 in Old Saybrook, Connecticut as the youngest of three daughters to Peter Clark Lane and Bertha James Lane in Old Saybrook, Connecticut. Her parents belonged to the black minority of the small town. Her father was a pharmacist and her mother was a shop owner, chiropodist, and hairdresser. Ann and her sister were raised "in the classic New England tradition: a study in efficiency, thrift, and utility (…) They were filled with ambitions that they might not have entertained had they lived in a city along with thousands of poor blacks stuck in demeaning jobs." On February 22, 1938, she married George D. Petry of New Iberia, Louisiana, which brought Petry to New York. She not only wrote articles for newspapers such as The Amsterdam News, or The People’s Voice, and published short stories in The Crisis, but also worked at an after-school program at P.S. 10 in Harlem. Traversing the streets of Harlem, living for the first time among large numbers of poor black people, seeing neglected children up close – Petry’s early years in New York inevitably made impressions on her. Impacted by her Harlem experiences, Ann Petry used her creative writing skills to bring this experience to paper. Her daughter Liz explained to the Washington Post that “her way of dealing with the problem was to write this book, which maybe was something that people who had grown up in Harlem couldn’t do.” Petry’s most popular novel The Street was published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. With The Street, Petry became the first black woman writer with book sales topping a million copies.

Bibliography

Books

14 books

Prentice Hall Literature--Silver cover

Prentice Hall Literature--Silver

1991

Sumner Braunstein, Rudolfo A. Anaya, Maya Angelou, Isaac Asimov, Toni Cade Bambara, Basho, Rosemary Benét, Morris Bishop, Arna Bontemps, Hal Borland, Ray Bradbury, Bruce Brooks, Pearl S. Buck, Arthur C. Clarke, Mark Twain, Davy Crockett, Bernard DeVoto, J. Frank Dobie, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Felton, Harold W., Robert Frost, Richard Garcia, Ellen Goodman, Frances Goodrich, Shirley Ann Grau, Albert Hackett, Edward Everett Hale, Virginia Hamilton, Robert Hayden, O. Henry, James Herriot, Patricia Hubbell, Langston Hughes, Evelyn Tooley Hunt, Zora Neale Hurston, Jerry Izenberg, Shirley Jackson, Gish Jen, Daniel Keyes, Naoshi Koriyama, Ursula K. Le Guin, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Stephen Longstreet, Anne McCaffrey, Phyllis McGinley, Machado de Assis, Robert MacNeil, Naomi Long Madgett, Beryl Markham, Joaquin Miller, N. Scott Momaday, Toshio Morita, Moritake, Anaïs Nin, Ann Lane Petry, Edgar Allan Poe, Julio Noboa Polanco, Wendy Rose, Roberto Felix Salazar, Ricardo Sanchez, Carl Sandburg, Lew Sarett, Juan A. A. Sedillo, Olive Senior, William Shakespeare, Mimi Sheraton, Shel Silverstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve, John Steinbeck, Adrien Stoutenburg, May Swenson, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Yoshiko Uchida, John Updike, Mark Van Doren, José García Villa, Alice Walker, Eudora Welty, Richard Wesley, Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Carlos Williams

Nine Short Novels by American Women cover

Nine Short Novels by American Women

1993

Elizabeth McMahan, Rebecca Harding Davis, Kate Chopin, Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Nella Larsen, Katherine Anne Porter, Tillie Olsen, Ann Lane Petry, Paule Marshall

Pearson Literature--California--Reading and Language cover

Pearson Literature--California--Reading and Language

2010

Grant P. Wiggins, Diane Ackerman, Brian W. Aldiss, Rudolfo A. Anaya, Maya Angelou, Susan B. Anthony, Brent K. Ashabranner, Isaac Asimov, Toni Cade Bambara, Stephen Vincent Benét, Cherie Bennett, Elizabeth Bishop, David Bottoms, Ray Bradbury, Joseph Bruchac, Lan Samantha Chang, Антон Павлович Чехов, Judith Ortiz Cofer, Stephen Crane, Davy Crockett, E. E. Cummings, Mary C. Curtis, Walter De la Mare, Emily Dickinson, Annie Dillard, Arthur Conan Doyle, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Erdoes, Richard, Eleanor Farjeon, Anne Frank, Russell Freedman, Robert Froman, Robert Frost, Lionel G. Garcia, Richard Garcia, Miep Gies, Nikki Giovanni, Alison Leslie Gold, Frances Goodrich, Robert Graves, Albert Hackett, Robert Hayden, O. Henry, Karen Hesse, Patricia Hubbell, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Shirley Jackson, Gish Jen, Georgia Douglas Camp Johnson, Daniel Keyes, Martin Luther King Jr., Emma Lazarus, Amy Ling, Jack London, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Robert MacNeil, Fredrick McKissack, Patricia McKissack, Eve Merriam, Andrew Mishkin, N. Scott Momaday, Pat Mora, Saki, Walter Dean Myers, Lensey Namioka, Pablo Neruda, Anaïs Nin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Alfonso Ortiz, Gary Paulsen, Ann Lane Petry, Edgar Allan Poe, William, Sydney Porter, Colin L. Powell, Wendy Rose, Ricardo Sanchez, Carl Sandburg, Juan A. Sedillo, William Shakespeare, Neil Simon, John Steinbeck, Jesse Stuart, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Jackie Torrence, Mark Twain, Yoshiko Uchida, John Updike, Alice Walker, Bailey White, Walt Whitman, Jacqueline Woodson