This image doesn’t have much to tell us about Ann Petry’s The Street. (It’s a lot more revealing about the paperback industry during its glory days of the 1950s and 1960s, when publishers often reprinted classics with cover art whose stylistic features were legacies of the pulp magazines.) I couldn’t resist posting it, though.
For more useful information about Petry and her world, you might take a look at this older post and follow some of the included links.
For more information about The People’s Voice, the Harlem newspaper where Petry worked before writing The Street, see this fine student research project.