![]() ![]() Perhaps it is not a coincidence that in the fictional world of The Street, as well as in her 1953 novel The Narrows, someone is always watching, and the looking is never innocent. “I feel as though I were a helpless creature impaled on a dissecting table–for public viewing,” she despaired. She was similarly miserable fifty years later during the publicity campaign for the 1992 edition of The Street. “I didn’t feel like being pursued, and questioned, and all the rest of it–flashbulbs, cameras, oooh!” she confided in her journal. Instead of being flattered she felt menaced. After the reporter Ed Sullivan mentioned the book in a 1945 newspaper column her phone rang nonstop. ![]() Suddenly she was a public curio, on display for the world to inspect. ![]() Petry knew that the media glare was occasioned as much by her race and gender as by her talent. Yet the limelight found her immediately upon the 1946 publication of her novel The Street, the first novel written by an African American woman to sell over a million copies. She hated having her picture taken, and she despised the attention that went along with celebrity. ANN PETRY NEVER LIKED THE WAY SHE LOOKED. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |