As much a historical document as it is a novel, this 1946 winner of the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award is the poignant and unblinkingly honest story of Lutie Johnson, a young black woman, and her spirited struggle to live and raise her son by herself amid the violence, poverty, and racial dissonance of Harlem in the late 1940s.

Originally published in 1946 and hailed by critics as a masterwork, The Street was Ann Petry’s first novel, a beloved best seller with more than a million copies in print. Its haunting tale still resonates today.

Ann Petry (1908-1997) was an American author who became the first African American woman writer with book sales topping a million copies for her novel The Street, which earned her the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship.