A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith (1943)
“A girl in the Brooklyn tenements discovers that reading, writing, and sheer stubbornness can grow through concrete — just like the Tree of Heaven in her backyard.”
At a Glance
Francie Nolan grows up in the Williamsburg tenements of Brooklyn in the early 1900s, the daughter of a charming but alcoholic singing waiter and a fiercely pragmatic cleaning woman. Through poverty, hunger, her father's death, workplace exploitation, and the upheavals of World War I, Francie clings to education and reading as her way out — embodying the Tree of Heaven that grows through cement in every Brooklyn yard, beautiful to nobody, impossible to kill.
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published in 1943, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was an instant bestseller — 300,000 copies in its first year. It arrived during WWII, when Americans were hungry for stories of resilience and immigrant grit. The novel became a cultural touchstone for the working class: millions of readers saw their own childhoods in Francie's. It was one of the first major American novels to center a girl's intellectual awakening in the context of poverty, predating the 'women's literary fiction' category by decades.
Diction Profile
Accessible, warm, and deceptively simple — conversational narration with Brooklyn dialect in dialogue and lyrical passages about reading and nature
Low to moderate