Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Vernon E. Lattin

Critical Essay by Vernon E. Lattin

SOURCE: “Ann Petry and the American Dream,” in Black American Literature Forum, Vol. 12, Spring, 1978, pp. 69–72.

In the following essay, Lattin says that readers should re-evaluate Petry's works as important critiques of traditional American values.

Ann Petry's fiction too often has been mutilated or dismissed by the use of critical labels, especially the Scylla and Charybdis of Bone's assimilationist and Negro nationalist nomenclature.¹ Although a number of critics have pointed out that Bone unwisely makes literary judgments on the basis of these sociological terms,² his approach continues to haunt Petry's writings. Bone, himself, speaks disparagingly of the “siren spell of assimilationism”; although he views Country Place as “the best of the assimilationist novels,”³ his praise is obviously tainted. More severe is Nick Aaron Ford's view that the novel is greatly inferior to The Street because Petry is “conjuring up vicarious experiences of a white society with which she...
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