Paperback: This special edition of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn (2018) is a 75th anniversary edition purchased at the Strand Bookstore in New York. A Tree Grows In Brooklyn is the beloved American classic about a young girl's coming-of-age at the turn of the twentieth century.
There's a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky. It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. It grows up and out of cellar gratings. It is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly...survives without sun, water and seemingly without earth. It would be considered beautiful except that there are too many of it.
Betty Smith's debut novel is universally regarded as a modern classic. The sprawling tale of an immigrant family in early 20th-century Brooklyn, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is one of the great distinctively American novels.
The Nolan family are first-generation immigrants to the United States. Originating in Ireland and Austria, their life in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn is poor and deprived, but their sacrifices make it possible for their children to grow up in a land of boundless opportunity.
Francie Nolan is the eldest daughter of the family. Alert, imaginative and resourceful, her journey through the first years of a century of profound change is difficult - and transformative. But amid the poverty and suffering among the poor of Brooklyn, there is hope, and the prospect of a brighter future.
About the author: Betty Smith was born Elisabeth Wehner in 1896 in New York to German parents. She grew up in relative poverty and attended Girls’ High School in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. These early experiences were the inspiration for the first novel that she wrote, A Tree Grows In Brooklyn which was published in 1943.
Shortly after getting married, she and her husband, George Smith, moved to Michigan so that he could study law. She had two twin daughters shortly after they moved and she waited until they were old enough to go to school before she completed her own education. She enrolled in classes at the university, despite having failed to complete her high school education. She took classes in literature, journalism, writing and drama. She worked hard and was rewarded with an Avery Hopwood Award.
Betty Smith divorced her husband and moved to North Carolina. Five years later, she married her second husband, Joseph Jones, in the same year in which her first novel was published. She worked alongside George Abbot to write the book for the stage musical adaptation of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, which was finished in 1951.
After A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, she wrote a further 3 novels. Tomorrow Will Be Better was published in 1947, Maggie-Now was published in 1958 and finally Joy in the Morning was published in 1963. This last novel was adapted into a film starring Yvette Mimieux and Richard Chamberlain.
Smith died in Connecticut in 1972 following a battle with pneumonia.
Rating: 5/5
I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn couple of years ago and found it just as enchanting as the title promised.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the reminder of this lovely book.