A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (novel)
First edition
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| Author | Betty Smith |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Harper & Brothers |
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Publication date
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1943 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 493 p. |
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a 1943 novel written by Betty Smith. The story focuses on an impoverished but aspirational, second-generation Irish-American, adolescent girl and her family in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York City, during the first two decades of the 20th century. The book was an immense success.
The main metaphor of the book is the hardy Tree of Heaven, native to China.
The novel is split into five "books", each covering a different period in the characters' lives.
Book One opens in 1912 and introduces 11-year-old Francie Nolan, who lives in the Williamsburg tenement neighborhood of Brooklyn with her 10-year-old brother Cornelius ("Neeley" for short) and their parents, Johnny and Katie. Francie relies on her imagination and her love of reading to provide a temporary escape from the poverty that defines her daily existence. The family subsists on Katie's wages from cleaning apartment buildings, pennies from the children's junk-selling and odd jobs, and Johnny's irregular earnings as a singing waiter. His alcoholism has made it difficult for him to hold a steady job, and he sees himself as a disappointment to his family as a result. Francie admires him because he is handsome, talented, emotional, and sentimental, like her. Katie has very little time for sentiment, since she is the breadwinner of the family who has forsaken fantasies and dreams for survival.
Book Two jumps back to 1900, with the meeting of Johnny and Katie, the teenage children of immigrants from Ireland and Austria, respectively. Although Johnny panics and begins drinking heavily when Katie becomes pregnant with first Francie and then Neeley, Katie resolves to give her children a better life than she has known, resolving to follow her mother's insistence that they receive a good education. Kate resents Francie because the baby is constantly ill, while Neeley is more robust. Kate makes a promise to herself that her daughter must never learn of her preference for Neeley. During the first seven years of their marriage, the Nolans are forced to move twice within Williamsburg, due to public disgraces caused first by Johnny's drunkenness and later by the children's Aunt Sissy's misguided efforts at babysitting them. The Nolans then arrive at the apartment introduced in Book One.
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