A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

About A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) follows Francie Nolan from ages eleven to seventeen in turn-of-the-century Williamsburg, Brooklyn — growing up in poverty with a charming alcoholic father, a fiercely practical mother, and the immigrant Irish Catholic community around her. One of the most beloved American coming-of-age novels of the twentieth century, it is a portrait of the specific texture of working-class childhood and the stubborn persistence of beauty and aspiration in poverty.