Not all who hide wish to be found.

Ann Petry’s first novel, “The Street,” was a literary event in 1946, praised and translated around the world — the first book by a black woman to sell more than a million copies. It’s the story of a catastrophe in agonizingly slow motion. A mother and her young son living in Harlem in the 1940s are ground down by poverty and the bitter racism and constant predation in their neglected neighborhood.

“Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North’s lynch mobs,” the mother, Lutie, thinks. “The method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place.” The book was greeted as a female counterpart to Richard Wright’s “Native Son,” a new classic of social realism and one of the early (and only) glimpses into the lives of black working-class women. Its author was feted and photographed and made utterly miserable.

Petry experienced celebrity as a kind of spiritual theft. “My soul was no longer my own,” she recalled to The Times in 1992. “I was a black woman at a point in time when being a writer was not usual, and I was besieged. Everyone wanted a part of me.” She fled Harlem for her hometown in Connecticut, where she lived in seclusion until her death, at 88, in 1997. The threat of exposure still loomed, and she destroyed her letters and other pieces of writing, and remained ambivalent whenever her work was reissued: “I feel as though I were a helpless creature impaled on a dissecting table — for public viewing,” she wrote in her journal.

The Library of America recently published “The Street” in one volume along with Petry’s 1953 masterpiece, “The Narrows,” and a sampling of her critical writing, edited by Farah Jasmine Griffin, a professor of English and African American Literature at Columbia University and the author of “Harlem Nocturne,” a group biography of radical women artists in the 1940s, including Petry. Read together, these works by Petry reveal, with fluorescent clarity, the through line between the life and the work — an intimate knowledge, and horror, of surveillance.