Question 1

Why is the tree of the title significant?

Accepted Answer

The 'tree' of the title is the ailanthus tree — also called the 'tree of heaven' — a species that grows prolifically in New York City, including through the pavement and up through the floors of abandoned buildings, and that Smith uses as a metaphor for the resilience of life in poverty. The novel's opening image is of the ailanthus tree in the Nolans' backyard, thriving without care in unpromising conditions, and Francie identifies with it from childhood: she and her family, like the tree, are growing in Brooklyn against odds that should prevent anything from thriving. The ailanthus tree is an invasive species that was introduced to North America from China and is often described as a 'weed tree' — aggressive, hardy, and unwanted by the manicured aesthetic of gardening culture — which makes it an appropriate symbol for the immigrant working class that Smith is writing about.

Question 2

What makes A Tree Grows in Brooklyn a coming-of-age novel?

Accepted Answer

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn follows the classic coming-of-age structure: the protagonist's growing awareness of the world beyond childhood, the loss of innocence through specific events (the death of her father, the realization of poverty's permanence, her first romantic disillusionment), and the development of a distinct adult identity out of the materials of her childhood. What makes it distinctive is the specificity and affection of its portrait of working-class immigrant Brooklyn: the Saturday-morning shopping trips to the market with her mother, the public library visits where Francie works her way through the alphabet of fiction, the aunt who tells stories, the father's singing in the saloons. Smith's novel insists that the specific texture of this childhood — the smells and sounds and rituals of poverty in a specific ethnic neighborhood in a specific era — is as worthy of literary attention as any more privileged experience.

Question 3

How does A Tree Grows in Brooklyn relate to memoir?

Accepted Answer

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a novel, not a memoir, but Betty Smith drew heavily on her own childhood in Williamsburg for its material: she grew up in a Brooklyn Irish Catholic working-class family, had an alcoholic father, and the specific details of Francie's life — the public library, the scholarship exams, the Saturday shopping trips — reflect Smith's own experience. The novel is often described as autobiographical fiction, and Smith herself described it as 'a novel closely related to my own childhood.' This blurring of fiction and autobiography is characteristic of the coming-of-age novel tradition that A Tree Grows in Brooklyn belongs to — alongside James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel — and it is one of the reasons the novel feels so immediately lived-in and specific.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Reading Order

Complete A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Book List