PicoBlog

Hi there, readers! 

Welcome to our group read of Betty Smith’s American classic, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Here’s our reading schedule, if you haven’t seen it yet: 

You can also access it with this Google Sheets link. 

Keep in mind that this schedule is very flexible. You’re an adult; read at whatever pace you want. All you need to know is that my weekly recaps will follow this schedule. 

This week, I have some background on author Betty Smith and a bit of context about life in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. 

Let me know if you have comments or questions — I’m excited to get started! 

Even while growing up in poverty in a Brooklyn tenement as a first-generation American, Betty Smith (1896-1972) cultivated a love for the written word. After getting an “A” in composition in early elementary school, she later said, “I knew then that I would write a book one day.” 

What she surely had no way of knowing, though, was that her first novel would touch millions of lives, even decades after being published. 

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn started as a non-fiction piece about Smith’s hardscrabble early life in Brooklyn at the turn of the 20th century. Realizing there was a little more creative freedom in fiction, she added dialogue and prose that turned it into the coming-of-age novel we have in our hands today. 

This means that the primary plot points and themes mostly follow the contours of Smith’s own impoverished childhood. Keep this fact in mind while reading. Smith herself felt many of the same emotions as main character Francie Nolan. 

Because of that, I don’t actually want to get much into Smith’s early life and give things away to folks who haven’t read the book. So let’s jump ahead to the 1920s, when Smith is out of Brooklyn. 

As with many women of the early 20th century, Betty Smith was saddled into an existence that didn’t reach beyond marriage or motherhood. But she still harbored dreams of being a writer. So once her two children reached school age, she took her own skills more seriously and enrolled in a number of writing, composition, and playwriting classes at the University of Michigan (her husband George worked there).

Betty clearly had some innate talent. After a couple years of classes she won a prestigious playwriting prize from the U of M — for a work called Francie Nolan — which put her name on the map as a writer on the rise.     

In the late 1930s Betty was able to take her theater and writing work more seriously as part of the federal government’s Works Projects Administration — one of FDR’s projects to combat the Great Depression. With more time to devote to her creative life, she produced A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which became an immediate bestseller upon being published in 1943. The atmospheric success of her book, especially with US soldiers overseas, catapulted Smith to literary fame. 

Though her three subsequent novels would not reach the same heights as her first, the younger version of Betty would’ve been astounded and damn proud that she eventually followed her dreams to create something that would become a lasting and indelible piece of American culture.   

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