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.”
Similar Books
Thematic connections across eras and genres — books that talk to each other.
The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The American Dream from opposite ends — Gatsby reaches from the top and falls, Francie climbs from the bottom and survives
The House on Mango Street
Sandra Cisneros
Same project compressed into vignettes — a girl in a poor neighborhood writing her way toward a different life
David Copperfield
Charles Dickens
The original child-poverty-to-literary-success novel — Smith's template, stripped of Dickens's sentimentality and coincidences
My Antonia
Willa Cather
Same plain prose, same respect for immigrant resilience, different geography — Nebraska's plains instead of Brooklyn's tenements
The Glass Castle
Jeannette Walls
Non-fiction echo — another daughter of a charming, unreliable father and a complicated mother, escaping poverty through education
Angela's Ashes
Frank McCourt
The Irish-Catholic poverty narrative Smith helped invent, transplanted back to Ireland and told through a boy's voice