Ann Petry publishes The Street — first million-copy novel by a Black woman

Ann Petry published The Street in 1946, a naturalist novel following Lutie Johnson, a single Black mother in wartime Harlem fighting racism, sexism, and poverty. Selling over 1.5 million copies, it was the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than one million copies. The New York Times called it 'a skillfully written and forceful first novel'; it remains a landmark of intersectional American literature.