The Narrows

"Petry is probably the least known of the writers on this list. I hope that will change. When people do read her, they tend to read The Street , her bestselling novel of 1946 about Lutie Johnson, a hard-working, working-class, single mother in Harlem. Petry writes in a social realist mode and addresses the social impediments to the progress of an African American woman who does everything right to escape a tragic fate. The story resonated in 1946 and continues to resonate today. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The Narrows is the novel that I think is her master work. It is set in a small New England city. Its protagonist is a young black man, a scholar-athlete who is born in that town and who falls in love with the town’s wealthy white heiress. I think it is Petry’s most accomplished novel, but it did not garner the attention it might have, perhaps because it came out around the same time as Invisible Man and Invisible Man was such a tour de force that it overshadowed The Narrows There might be an appearance of gender parity now, but throughout most of the tradition there had not been. Frederick Douglas s was much better known in the nineteenth century than Linda Brent. Literary critics and historians drew attention to writers like Brent, and brought them back into publication. Until the renaissance of writing by black women in the 1970s, with authors like Alice Walker, and in the 1980s with Toni Morrison , there was no parity. After they emerged at the forefront of African American literary production, garnering the greatest number of readers and the most critical acclaim, academics began recovering the work of writers like Petry and Hurston. Hurston’s work, which is now so well-known, had been out-of-print for decades. A generation of black feminists brought these writers back to the forefront."