by Ann Petry

Born in Old Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1908, Ann Petry grew up in one of the small town's only two black families. She moved to the predominantly poor, black community of Harlem, New York, in 1938. Tituba of Salem Village is one of the author's many novels that focus on the lives of black people and the racial tensions of American society. Although it chronicles the seventeenth-century Salem witch trials, the novel concerns issues that reappear in twentieth-century America.

Events in History at the Time the Novel Takes Place

Puritanism in colonial Massachusetts. Puritanism was a Protestant sect that had its roots in sixteenth-century England. It originally grew from a desire to "purify" the country's national religious institution, the Church of England. Puritans wanted to eliminate all the church's similarities to Catholicism by simplifying worship, reducing its elaborate administrative hierarchy, and employing...