The Narrows (Black Women Writers Series) - Softcover

Petry, Ann

4.17

586 ratings by Goodreads

9780807083031: The Narrows (Black Women Writers Series)

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807083038 ISBN 13: 9780807083031

Publisher: Beacon Press, 1988

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When Link Williams, a college-educated twenty-six-year-old African-American man, falls for Camilo Sheffield, a wealthy married white woman, things will never be the same in the sleepy New England town of Monmouth, Connecticut. Set in the 1950s, this unforgettable classic deftly evokes a tragic love affair and offers a window onto the powerful ways in which class, race, and love intersected in midcentury America.

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About the Author:

Ann Petry (1908-1997), a black novelist, short story writer, and writer of books for young people, is one of America's most distinguished authors. Ann began by studying pharmacology, and in 1934, received her Doctor of Pharmacy degree from the University of Connecticut College of Pharmacy. She worked as a registered pharmacist in Old Saybrook and in Lyme, and during these years wrote several short stories. When she married George David Petry in 1938, the course of her life changed. They lived in New York City, and Ann went to work for the Harlem Amsterdam News. By 1941, she was covering general news stories and editing the women's pages of the People's Voice in Harlem. Her first published story appeared in 1943 in the Crisis, a magazine published monthly by the NAACP. Subsequent to that, she began work on her first novel, The Street, which was published in 1946 and for which she received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship. Mrs. Petry has written two more novels, The Country Place and The Narrows, and numerous short stories, articles and children's books. In addition, she was appointed visiting professor of English at the University of Hawaii (1944 - 45) and has lectured widely throughout the United States. Ann returned with her husband to Old Saybrook in 1947 and lived there until here death. They have one daughter.

Review:

“Petry’s novels are unique for their time, and brilliant expositions in the intricacies of their literary, political, philosophical, and social implications. Written in a period when deliberate black feminist fiction and black feminist interpretations of fiction were ideas whose time had not yet come, they were revolutionary.” — Nellie Y. McKay

“Before the Bottom, before Brewster Place, there was the Narrows (also called the Eye of the Needle, the Bottom, Little Harlem, Dark Town, Niggertown). Before China, one of the whores in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, there was China the whore who lived in the Narrows.Before Alice Walker’s sexy blues singer Shug Avery, there was Mamie Powther, the busty, sensual, blues-singing woman desired by all the men of the Narrows and beyond. And before Milkman Dead, the middle-class protagonist of Morrison’s Song of Solomon, was Link Williams, the Robesonesque lead character of Ann Petry’s final novel, The Narrows.”—Farah Jasmine Griffin, Columbia University

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