COUNTRY PLACE

London: Michael Joseph, 1948. First English edition. Small 8vo, pp. 223. Red cloth. Top edges spotted, ends of spine slightly scuffed, o/w a nice copy in little soiled dj. Petry (1908-1997) was born in Old Saybrook, CT, to a family of chemists. 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. Petry received a degree in Pharmacy from the University of Connecticut in 1931. She attended Columbia University from 1943-44. 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. She was a member of the American Negro Theatre. 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. Petry's most popular novel The Street was published in 1946 and won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship with book sales topping a million copies.