Art Np2

This is supposed to be over with, but as Wide Awake Jake says I am slow, surly, and contrary, it took me over a day to finish what should have been done yesterday. I loved Winesburg Ohio by Sherwood Anderson.  The book is about the people of a small town in Ohio after the Civil War and before industrialization, and how their strong narrow concentration on specific truths make them self destructive, and/or lonely, and/or out of touch with reality.  The narrator calls them grotesques.   I saw how this book influenced Ann Petry when she wrote A Country Place .  That book is also about a small town and people who live in close proximity to others who are quietly struggling and trying to figure out what to do next.  Ann Petry's town is in Connecticut.  I thought quiet struggle was a mid-western way of doing things.  A Country Place is set after World War II.  Both are coming of age stories that involve moving away from t...

Ann Petry The Street is a novel written by Ann Petry in 1946. When first published the book was widely read and sold a million copies. It is an American classic that tells the story of Lutie Johnson, a loner, a mother, and thoughtful African American woman reaching for the American dream from a poverty stricken Harlem neighborhood. Chapter one describes 116th in Harlem, as cold, discouraging, and strewn with garbage. (1-2) Some readers might ask why Lutie chooses to live in such a desolate and gloomy place. Lutie and her son Bub move to escape the negative influence of her alcoholic father and his drunken girlfriend after being forced to move in with them following the breakup of her marriage. Unfortunately, she cannot afford to live anywhere else.  Her income from her job as a file clerk is barely enough to cover her rent and other bills and so it is Lutie verses the street. The omniscient narrator allows the reader to see how Lutie’s life came to be through her many, m...