1. “The Novel as Social Criticism” -Ann Petry & Others
By: Jordan Sterling Henry

2. Ann Petry (October 12, 1908 – April 28, 1997)
Early Life
Born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.
Daughter of Peter Clark Lane and Bertha James Lane.
The youngest of three daughters.
“Raised in the classic New England tradition: a study in efficiency, thrift, and utility.”

3. Career
Graduated with a Ph.G. degree from Connecticut College of Pharmacy in New Haven in 1931.
On February 22, 1938 Ann Lane married George D. Petry of New Iberia, Louisiana.
Ann and George Petry moved to New York.
Petry wrote articles for the newspapers The Amsterdam News and The People’s Voice, also published short stories in The Crisis.

4. Major Works & Accomplishments
Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship (1945)
The first black woman writer with book sales over a million copies (The Street).
“A Winding Street” (1945)
The Street (1946)
Country Place (1971)
“The Novel as Social Criticism” (1950)
The Drugstore Cat (1949)

5. The Novel as Social Criticism
Themes
Social Criticism- the reasons for malicious conditions of society in flawed social structures.
Proletarian- originally recognized as those people who had no wealth other than their children.
Defying the status quo
Naturalism vs Realism

9. Significant Quotes
“It took me quite awhile to realize that there were fashions in literary criticism and that they shifted and changed much like the fashions in women’s hats.”
“Modern novels with their ‘messages’ are cut from the same bolt of cloth as the world’s folk tales and fairy stories, the parables of the Bible, the old morality plays, the Greek tragedies, the Shakespearean tragedies.”
“It seems to me that all truly great art is propaganda, whether it be the Sistine Chapel, or La Gioconda, Madame Bovary, or War and Peace.”
“The Old Testament an idea that has been corrupted in a thousands ways sometimes it has been offered to the world as social, and then again as communism. It was used to justify the Inquisition of the Roman Church in Spain, the burning of witches in New England, the institution of slavery in the South.”