Ann Petry The Street The Narrows Loa 314

In one volume, two landmark novels about the terrible power of race in America from one of the foremost African American writers of the past century. Ann Petry is increasingly recognized as one of the essential American novelists of the twentieth century. Now, she joins the Library of America series with this deluxe hardcover volume gathering her two greatest works. Published in 1946 to widespread critical and popular acclaim--it was the first novel by an African-American woman to sell over a million copies--The Street follows Lutie Johnson, a young, newly single mother, as she struggles to make a better life for her son, Bub. An intimate account of the aspirations and challenges of black, female, working-class life, much of it set on a single block in Harlem, the novel exposes structural inequalities in American society while telling a complex human story, as overpriced housing, lack of opportunity, sexual harassment, and racism conspire to limit Lutie's potential and to break her buoyant spirit. Less widely read than her blockbuster debut and still underappreciated, The Narrows (1953) is Petry's most ambitious and accomplished novel--a multi-layered, stylistically innovative exploration of themes of race, class, sexuality, gender, and power in postwar America. Centered around an adulterous interracial affair in a small Connecticut town between the young black scholar-athlete Link Williams and white, privileged munitions heiress Camilo Sheffield, it is also a fond, incisive community portrait, full of unforgettable minor characters, unexpected humor, and a rich sense of history. Also included in the volume are three of Petry's previously uncollected essays related to the novels and a newly researched chronology of the author's life, prepared with the assistance of her daughter Elisabeth Petry. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

“Petry is the writer we have been waiting for; hers are the stories we need to fully illuminate the questions of our moment, while also offering a page-turning good time. Ann Petry, the woman, had it all, and so does her insightful, prescient and unputdownable prose.” — Tayari Jones, New York Times Book Review From author of the bestselling novel The Street, a “masterpiece of social realism” (Wall Street Journal) about a tragic love affair, and a powerful look into how class, race, and love intersected in midcentury America. With a new introduction by Kaitlyn Greenidge, author of Libertie. “The Narrows deftly explores what it means to have an interior life under the unrelenting gaze of whiteness...it is a master class in using descriptions of place and space to explore the realities of race, gender, class and psychology.”—Kaitlyn Greenidge, from her introduction It’s Saturday, past midnight, and thick fog rolls in from the river like smoke. Link Williams is standing on the dock when he hears quick footsteps approaching, and the gasp of a woman too terrified to scream. After chasing off her pursuer, he takes the woman to a nearby bar to calm her nerves, and as they enter, it’s as if the oxygen has left the room: they, and the other patrons, see in the dim light that he’s Black and she’s white. Link is a brilliant Dartmouth graduate, former athlete and soldier who, because of the lack of opportunities available to him, tends bar; Camilo is a wealthy married woman dissatisfied with and bored of her life of privilege. Thrown together by a chance encounter, both Link and Camilo secretly cross the town’s racial divide, defying the social prejudices of their times. In this stunning and heartbreaking story, Petry illuminates the harsh realities of race and class through two doomed lovers. This profound, necessary novel stakes Petry’s place as an indelible writer of American literature. “I’ve recently had my brain re-wired by Ann Petry, and it’s that exhilarating feeling of falling in love with one of your lifetime writers for the first time.” —Brandon Tyler

A treasure trove of correspondence among novelist Ann Petry's ancestors Ann Petry (1908-1997) achieved prominence during a period in which few black women were published with regularity in America. Her novels Country Place (1947) and The Narrows (1988), along with various short stories and nonfiction, poignantly described the struggles and triumphs of middle-class blacks living in primarily white communities. Petry's ancestors, the James family, served as in-spiration for much of her fiction. This collection of more than four hundred family letters, edited by the daughter of Ann Petry, is an engaging portrait of black family life from the 1890s to the early twentieth century, a period not often documented by African American voices. Ann Petry's maternal grandfather, Willis Samuel James, was a slave taught by his children to read and write. He believed "the best place for the negro is as near the white man as he can get." He followed that "truth," working as coachman for a Connecticut governor and buying a house in a white neighborhood in Hartford. Willis had sixteen children by three wives. The letters in this collection are from him and his second wife, Anna E. Houston James, and five of Anna's children, of whom novelist Ann Petry's mother, Bertha James Lane, was the oldest. History is made and remade by the availability of new documents, sources, and interpretations. Can Anything Beat White? contributes a great deal to this process. The experiences of the James family as documented in their letters challenge both representations of black people at the turn of the century

An examination of the role of sound in twentieth-century arts. This interdisciplinary history and theory of sound in the arts reads the twentieth century by listening to it—to the emphatic and exceptional sounds of modernism and those on the cusp of postmodernism, recorded sound, noise, silence, the fluid sounds of immersion and dripping, and the meat voices of viruses, screams, and bestial cries. Focusing on Europe in the first half of the century and the United States in the postwar years, Douglas Kahn explores aural activities in literature, music, visual arts, theater, and film. Placing aurality at the center of the history of the arts, he revisits key artistic questions, listening to the sounds that drown out the politics and poetics that generated them. Artists discussed include Antonin Artaud, George Brecht, William Burroughs, John Cage, Sergei Eisenstein, Fluxus, Allan Kaprow, Michael McClure, Yoko Ono, Jackson Pollock, Luigi Russolo, and Dziga Vertov.

For the first time in a deluxe boxed set, the definitive edition of Richard Wright's landmark works in the form in which he intended them to be read. Here, in authoritative texts based on the author's original typescripts and proofs, is the Library of America's acclaimed edition of Richard Wright's major works. Wright's first novel, Lawd Today!, published posthumously in 1963 and here presented for the first time in its original form, interweaves news bulletins, songs, exuberant wordplay, and scenes of confrontation and celebration into a kaleidoscopic chronicle of the events of one day in the life of a black Chicago postal worker. Uncle Tom's Children first brought Wright to national attention. The characters in these five stories struggle to survive the cruelty of racism in the South, as Wright asks what quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity. Wright's masterpiece, Native Son, exploded on the American literary scene in 1940. The story of Bigger Thomas, a young black man living in the raw, noisy, crowded slums of Chicago's South Side, captured the hopes and yearnings, the pain and rage of black Americans with an unprecedented intensity and vividness. The text printed in this volume restores the changes and cuts--including the replacement of an entire scene--that Wright was forced to make by book club editors who feared offending their readers. Wright's wrenching memoir Black Boy, an eloquent account of his struggle to escape a life of poverty, ignorance and fear in his native South, was an immediate bestseller when it appeared in 1945. But Wright's complete autobiography, published for the first time in this volume as Black Boy (American Hunger), is a far more complex and probing work, chronicaling his encounter with racism in the North, his apprenticeship as a writer, and his disillusionment with the Communist Party. Wright's 1953 novel The Outsider appears here in a text that restores the many stylistic changes and long cuts made by his editors without his knowledge. When Cross Damon is mistakenly believed to have died in a subway accident, he seizes the opportunity to invent a new life for himself. The text here, based on Wright's final, corrected typescript, casts new light on his development of the style he called poetic realism. Boxed set contains Richard Wright: Early Works, 936 pp., and Richard Wright: Later Works, 887 pp., volumes #55 and #56 in the Library of America series.

Identifies some 1,700 works about African Americans. Entries include full bibliographic information as well as Library of Congress call numbers and location in 11 major university libraries. Entries are arranged by subjects such as art, civil rights, folk tales, history, legal status, medicine, music, race relations, and regional studies. First published in 1970 by the Library of Congress.

This second edition provides a cutting-edge overview of physical, technical and scientific aspects related to the widely used analytical method of confocal Raman microscopy. The book includes expanded background information and adds insights into how confocal Raman microscopy, especially 3D Raman imaging, can be integrated with other methods to produce a variety of correlative microscopy combinations. The benefits are then demonstrated and supported by numerous examples from the fields of materials science, 2D materials, the life sciences, pharmaceutical research and development, as well as the geosciences.