“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” was an immediate best-seller when it was published, in 1943, and proved particularly popular with servicemen. Many readers addressed their fan letters not to the author, Betty Smith, but to her main character, Francie Nolan, a dirt-poor tenement child with big dreams. Smith’s book sold around three million copies by 1945. That same year a Hollywood movie based on it came out. An ad for the Literary Guild in The New Yorker used the book’s runaway success to hawk membership in the Guild, with the headline “This laughing, loving story of the Brooklyn Nolans is the nation’s biggest-selling hit!”
Smith, born Elizabeth Wehner, in 1896, grew up in a world not far removed from the one described by an outraged Jacob Riis in “How the Other Half Lives,” and she drew heavily on her childhood in Williamsburg in writing her most famous novel. Those laughing, loving Brooklyn Nolans struggle with poverty and malnutrition. Francie’s mother, Katie, works as a tenement “janitress” in exchange for the family’s apartment, and the children are constantly hungry. They have to live on what Katie makes, because her husband—Francie’s beloved father—Johnny Nolan, is an alcoholic who loses his job as a singing waiter and drinks himself to death.
Francie, an incipient writer, is growing up in a world full of fascinating details and sensations that she is eager to describe—but it is also a world filled with cruelty, danger, and shame, especially for women. Child molesters lurk in the shadows. Smart, ambitious girls are forced to drop out of school to bring home tiny salaries. Unmarried pregnant women are starved by their families and stoned by their neighbors. Husbands can be brutal, and even a young girl knows that childbirth is torture. Newborns often die—Francie’s favorite aunt, Sissy, gives birth to ten stillborn children. The balance of gritty reality and sentimentality, the very real sense of hovering threat and sexual danger filtered through the sensibility of an artistic word-hungry child, gives the book its special character.
And yet, since the book was published, it has often been treated as a kind of feel-good coming-of-age story for girls. The Literary Guild ad proclaimed that “Francie’s life story is the story of a city girl who grew into beautiful womanhood because she chose to make life give her its glorious things, because she knew she could have them if she chose.” Francie, who is eleven years old when the novel begins, is determined and ambitious, but she is also desperately aware of the importance of money, and she knows very well that life may in fact not give her any “glorious things.” She is at times enraptured with the sights and smells of her German-Irish Brooklyn, but she also wants out, and she knows, and her world teaches her over and over, that if she slips, if she makes a mistake, she will never get away. Though the book has been memorialized as the quintessential Brooklyn novel, it is really a story of getting out of Brooklyn—of escaping the poverty and brutality of immigrant New York, leaving your family behind, and grabbing the education that will help you move up into the middle class.
Smith took control of her destiny by leaving Brooklyn in 1919, at the age of twenty-two, for Michigan. Her path out of New York was not easy: her mother, Catherine, made her leave school at fourteen and get a job, and did not let her go back; Catherine’s priority was to keep her son in school. Betty worked in a restaurant, a flower factory, a department store, and a mail-order house before making it to Ann Arbor to join a University of Michigan law student named George Smith, whom she immediately married. They were two smart kids from Brooklyn; she had been a member of the Jackson Street Settlement House debate team, and he was the coach. In Ann Arbor, she could not officially enroll in the university herself, since she hadn’t graduated high school, but she audited courses, including writing courses.
In 1931, Smith won the University of Michigan’s Avery Hopwood Award, and a thousand-dollar prize, for a three-act play called “Francie Nolan.” This first iteration of Francie Nolan, twelve years before “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” is the young-adult daughter of a New York City cop; she works as a song-plugger at a five-and-dime store in Brooklyn until she gets pregnant by the boss’s son and her parents throw her out. The play, which Smith retitled “Becomes a Woman,” was not actually produced until 2023, when the Mint Theatre Company in New York City, which retrieves and stages lost plays from the past, put on a full production. This Francie Nolan has no literary dreams, and she lives in a world of rigidly unforgiving morality; by getting pregnant, she’s lost her parents’ affection and essentially ruined her life. Still, she’s a survivor, and by the end of the play she has “become a woman”—she can make decisions for herself and her child, taking some measure of control over what will happen next.
Though the play was not produced in 1931, perhaps because of its scandalous content, it garnered Smith an invitation to study playwriting at the Yale Department of Drama. Smith and her husband moved to New Haven with their two daughters, but separated shortly thereafter. Betty then met Bob Finch, an actor and graduate student, and they fell in love, becoming writing and acting partners. In 1936, she and Finch settled in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. It was there that she began to write a novel, recycling the name Francie Nolan from that prize-winning play that had launched her. Smith’s original title for her “Brooklyn novel” was “They Lived in Brooklyn.” Her early notes for the project were made in a copy of Thomas Wolfe’s “Of Time and the River,” and her daughter later cited “Call It Sleep” as an important influence.
In 1942, Smith sent her “Brooklyn novel” to Harper & Brothers for a contest. Her biographer, Valerie Yow, describes Smith’s reaction when she learned that only nonfiction was eligible for the prize: “I wouldn’t tag it autobiographical,” she wrote to the editors. She explained that she needed to protect her children. “Myself, I am no snob but the children are ‘southern’ and it wouldn’t do them any good socially to be connected with this background.” “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” is certainly not a memoir. Smith created some characters with parallels to her family, even using some real family names, but she also altered many details—Francie, like Smith, has a younger brother who is their mother’s favorite, but the sister who in real life came two years after that is gone; there’s a much younger sister, born very late in the novel. Smith’s parents, Johnny Wehner and Catherine Hummel, were both the children of German immigrants, but Smith, writing in wartime, gave Francie an Austrian mother and an Irish father. Francie has an Aunt Evy, just as Smith did, but the most memorable aunt in the book, the cheerfully lusty Sissy, with her many “marriages,” all to men she calls John, is largely fictional. Smith incorporated people from other families, stories from the neighborhood—there’s a terrifying lurking child molester who came from a newspaper article.
The novel begins in 1912, as Francie carefully assigns Saturday afternoon in Brooklyn the perfect adjective, “serene,” an incipient author savoring the urban landscape she loves. She and her younger brother, Neeley, sell the junk they have been collecting all week to the “junkie,” spend some of their pennies on candy at Cheap Charlie’s, and then help their mother provision the home with poor people’s food: the stale bread sold at half price at Losher’s bread factory, the bony end of the tongue from Mr. Sauerwein’s store. Neeley and his friends play baseball, hoping to be scouted by the Brooklyn’s, who would not become the Dodgers until later. (“And there wasn’t a Brooklyn boy who wouldn’t rather play on the Brooklyn’s team than be president of the United States.”)
But Francie, that writer-to-be, goes off to the library, a place she loves that most definitely does not love her back: the librarian “hated children,” and “since she never looked up into a child’s face, she never did get to know the little girl who took a book out every day and two on Saturday.” Francie takes out the next book in alphabetical order—planning to read them all, she’s in the “B”s—and spends the afternoon on the fire escape, reading her book and observing the neighborhood through the leaves of the backyard ailanthus tree, the tree of heaven, referenced in the title, an opportunistic plant which thrives “in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps. . . . It grew lushly, but only in the tenements district.”
Francie has an eye for detail and an intense interest in her surroundings in Brooklyn, and in poor people’s lives. Smith, in tracing that evolving sensibility, found her own subject as a writer, creating a masterpiece in this relatively unplotted novel, so different from the melodrama of her unproduced play about the first Francie Nolan. The Francie in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” is a writer from the beginning, and her subject, like Smith’s, is the tenement world around her. She gets into trouble in school because, after her father dies, she insists on writing honestly about him, when her teacher wants something more beautiful and inspirational, like the straight-A compositions that Francie used to write. “Poverty, starvation and drunkenness are ugly subjects to choose,” the teacher tells her. “We all admit these things exist. But one doesn’t write about them.” “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” can be seen as a response to that teacher, packed with closely observed details about everything the teacher called “sordid,” especially hunger, drunkenness, and poverty.
Francie lies awake at night listening to the sounds coming through the airshaft, “the childlike bride who lived in one of the other flats with her ape-like truck-driver husband.” She hears the woman pleading, the man demanding. “Then there would be a short silence. Then he would start snoring and the wife would cry piteously until nearly morning.” The novel is shadowed with sexual predators, from the very first chapter, which describes the candy-store proprietor who “was a gentle man, kind to little children . . . or so everyone thought until that sunny afternoon when he inveigled a little girl into his dismal back room.” The summer that Francie is fourteen, a child molester is haunting Williamsburg. “When a little girl was attacked, the parents kept it secret so that no one would know and discriminate against the child and look on her as a thing apart and make it impossible for her to resume a normal childhood with her playmates.” Then he kills a seven-year-old girl on Francie’s block, and parents are forced to talk about the subject—and warn their children—and “the whole neighborhood was terrorized.”
“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” can teach you the rules of getting by in Francie’s world; it’s almost a handbook for tenement life. I have assigned parts of it in a class on childhood nutrition; as they provision the pantry, you learn what a huge all-day-every-day project it is for the Nolans to find enough to eat. Those loaves of stale bread that Francie brings home are the basic stuff of their diet, fried into little balls, rebaked into loaves, sweetened for dessert. No wonder Francie and Neeley are always hungry, no wonder the neighborhood boys are described as thin, pinched. Smith is a talented reporter, and a kind of sociologist, particularly of female urban poverty. In two later novels, “Tomorrow Will Be Better” (1948) and “Maggie-Now” (1958), she explores Brooklyn marriage, childbirth, infertility, and foster children in greater detail than she does in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.” Through Francie’s eyes, she covers neighborhood perspectives on menstruation, unwanted pregnancy, labor and delivery, nursing and weaning. Francie is fiercely loyal to her family, even as she reveals the harsh facts of her upbringing, but she is also, clearly, going places—a hard worker in an America that allows her a real shot at education and social mobility. This Francie will not be derailed by passion; she will experience sexual yearnings, but she will not risk pregnancy.
