In the famous opening scene of his first novella, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, published in 1893, Stephen Crane writes: A very tittle boy stood upon a heap of gravel for the honor of Rum Alley. He throwing stones at howling urchins from Devil's Row who were circling madly about the heap and pelting at him. His infantile countenance livid fury. His small body writhing in the delivery of great, crimson oaths. Run, Jimmie, run! Dey'll get yehs, screamed a retreating Rum Alley child. Naw, responded Jimmie a valiant roar, dese micks can't make me run. (1) This is the reader's introduction to the streets of Crane's lower Manhattan and to the people who inhabit them, most notably Jimmie Johnson, Maggie's brother. We are not alone in witnessing the described: From a window of apartment house ... there leaned a curious woman. Fifty-three years later, in 1946, Ann Petry includes a strikingly similar scene in her first novel, The Street. This street is in Harlem, and this desperate battle is waged not rocks but garbage: Kids were using bags of garbage from the cans tined up along the curb as ammunition. The bags had broken open, covering the sidewalk litter, filling the air a strong, rancid smell. Here, as in Maggie, a woman watches from a Mrs. Hedges, who runs a house of prostitution from her apartment, was leaning far out of her window. Whereas Crane's onlooker is silent, Mrs. Hedges speaks, urging the contestants on. The name of the child to whom she calls out suggests that the echo of Crane's Maggie is more than coincidence: That's right, Jimmie.... Hit him on the head. And then as the bag went past its mark, Aw, shucks, boy, what's the matter your aim? (2) This is a deliberate invocation of Crane, I believe, indicating a multi-faceted, heretofore unnoticed dialogue between Ann Petry's The Street and Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets. (3) The Street holds the distinction of being the first novel by African American woman to sell more than a million copies. The novel's success brought Ann Petry widespread praise and immediate fame. Translations appeared around the globe--in France, Brazil, Israel, and Japan, for example--soon after its publication; in 1953, Raj Ratna Pictures of Bombay requested Petry's permission to adapt The Street into an Indian-Hindi picture, with slight modifications to suit the conditions in India. (4) Today, critics often emphasize Petry's influence on later generations of black women writers, such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gloria Naylor. Less frequently, Petry is studied in the context of black novelists, all men, who turned to naturalism in the 1940s, including Chester Himes, William Attaway, and Richard Wright. Less frequently still is this group of African American naturalists from the 1940s, or without Petry, studied in the context of white naturalists--such as Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Stephen Crane--who preceded them. The possibility that Ann Petty engages Stephen Crane in her writing has not been entertained. (5) In her introduction to Soft Canons, a collection of essays blurring the lines between masculine and feminine.... black and white, straight and gay, [and] Western and Eastern traditions, Karen Kilcup acknowledges the necessity of explor[ing] minoritized writing by itself, but she also suggests that it may be more beneficial at this moment of cultural fragmentation in the United States to inquire into the conversations between, and even the meshings of, 'traditions.' (6) One cannot help but notice a troubling irony in how our tendency to segregate literary traditions along fines of race and gender, while essential and productive in many ways, can keep us from noticing a black woman's dialogue one of America's best-known white male writers in a novel that is, at heart, a blistering critique of the color fine. …