African American Women Writers

Reprint of a 1946 novel, based upon the true story of Lutie Johnson, a young African-American woman who struggled to live and raise her son in the midst of the poverty and violence of Harlem in the late 1940s.

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.

The fiction of African-American author Ann Petry confronts prejudices of race, sex, and class and marks the ways the American dream of success and plenitude haunts, and ultimately mocks, those people who fail to achieve it. Petry calls her characters "the walking wounded." Betrayal, deep-seated anger, and murderous violence recur throughout her three novels, The Street (1946), Country Place (1947), and The Narrows (1953).

Traces interrelations between value and race, such as literate/illiterate, the signing/singing voice, time/space, civic/criminal, and academy/street, and offers relevant and fresh readings of two novels by Ann Petry.

Using gothic criticism, masculinity and gender studies, queer theory, and psychoanalytic theory, Keith Clark offers fresh readings of Petry's three novels and collection of short stories. While confirming the Black feminist dimensions of Petry's writing, Clark also assesses the writer's representations of an array of Black and white masculine behaviors -- some socially sanctioned, others taboo.