Racism invites Petry’s most scathing attacks, not only for the material hardship it forces upon people of color but also for the psychological and cultural distortions it produces. Rather than celebrating the American ideal of self-making with which her native New England is so closely associated, Petry exposes the illusions it has fostered and depicts their graphic costs to those relegated to the periphery of American possibility.

Her work also reveals an increasingly overt Christian existentialist vision celebrating the individual’s potential for spiritual liberation, through which an entire culture might come to relinquish its crippling prejudices. , like all other forms of art, will always reflect the political, economic, and social structure of the period in which it was created. It seems to me that all truly great art is propaganda. I find it difficult to subscribe to the idea that art exists for art’s sake. Like her contemporaries, black and white alike, who came of age in the 1930’s, she adopted a social realist aesthetic committed to documenting the obstacles to human fulfillment imposed on those at the margins of American prosperity. That vision explains what might otherwise seem to be inconsistencies of direction in Petry’s career: her decision, for example, following the potent racial protest of The Street to focus her next novel, Country Place, on a white community’s postwar crises of adjustment or her movement into the realm of children’s literature. Thus her aims are consistently broader than racial critique, since she regularly exposes the consequences of America’s hierarchical social systems and its capitalistic materialism. Although Ann Petry’s (Octo– April 28, 1997) fiction typically involves African Americans struggling against the crippling impact of racism, her overarching theme involves a more broadly defined notion of prejudice that targets class and gender as well as race.

The street ann petry sparknotes