Ann Petry

Ann Petry wrote novels, short stories, children's books and journalism, and her 1946 debut, The Street, became the first novel by an African-American woman to sell more than a million copies. Her other books included The Narrows, the story collection Miss Muriel and Other Stories, and Country Place, a novel about a World War II veteran's unsettled homecoming to a small New England town. In 2019 the Library of America published a volume gathering The Street, The Narrows and several shorter nonfiction pieces, and she died in 1997.