Betty Smith: The Tree That Grew From Williamsburg's Tenements
- Marina Aris
- Jan 28
- 3 min read
A note from our founder
Our fourth tribute takes us to Williamsburg, and to a writer who turned a childhood of real hardship into one of the most beloved coming-of-age novels America has ever produced. Betty Smith never set out to write the great Brooklyn novel. She wrote the only Brooklyn she knew — and it turned out to be the one the whole country needed to read.
A Girlhood Spent in Want
Betty Smith was born Elisabeth Wehner on December 15, 1896, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the daughter of German immigrant parents. Money was scarce for the entire length of her childhood, and the family's day-to-day struggle to get by — crowded tenement apartments, stretched meals, the constant math of making a little cover a lot — became the material she would return to again and again once she started writing. She left school early to help support her family, but the hunger for learning that poverty had interrupted never left her. She kept reading, kept writing, and kept finding ways to educate herself long after her formal schooling had ended.
Finding Her Way to the Stage
Smith eventually left New York for the Midwest, where she talked her way into auditing classes at the University of Michigan despite never having finished high school. It was there that her playwriting began to win real recognition, earning her several prestigious awards and enough momentum to carry her to Yale University, where she studied drama formally for the first time. The detour was a long one, but it gave her the technical grounding — structure, dialogue, pacing — that would later make her fiction feel so lived-in.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
In 1943, Smith published her debut novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, and it made her famous almost overnight. The book, deeply rooted in her own girlhood, follows young Francie Nolan as she grows up poor but fiercely alive in the tenements of Williamsburg. It arrived in the middle of World War II and struck an immediate chord with a country in the middle of its own hardship. The novel became a runaway bestseller and was printed as an Armed Services Edition, meaning millions of American soldiers overseas carried Francie Nolan's Brooklyn with them into the war. Few debut novels have ever landed with that kind of reach, or that kind of staying power.
Her Brooklyn, From a Distance
Smith spent the second half of her life in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where she continued writing novels and plays until her death on January 17, 1972. But the streets she never stopped writing about were the ones she'd left behind. Whatever distance she put between herself and Williamsburg, her finest work never really left it — and neither, it seems, did she.
Selected Bibliography
Novels
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) — Her timeless debut, following Francie Nolan, a fiercely imaginative girl growing up amid poverty and family hardship in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
Tomorrow Will Be Better (1948) — Set in the 1920s, the story of Margy Shannon, a hopeful young Brooklyn woman determined to build a life of security and love despite her parents' cynicism.
Maggie-Now (1958) — A multi-generational portrait of an Irish-American daughter in Brooklyn who repeatedly sets aside her own dreams to care for the men in her family.
Joy in the Morning (1963) — A warm, autobiographical novel about a newlywed couple facing money troubles and hard-won resilience in a 1920s Midwestern college town.
Select Screenplays & Stage Plays
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Musical) (1951) — Smith co-wrote the book for the Broadway musical adaptation of her own novel, working alongside director George Abbott.
READ SMITH
Start where the world did: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is still the best introduction to Betty Smith, and to the Williamsburg she carried with her for the rest of her life. It's a novel about getting by on very little and finding beauty anyway — a fitting piece of Brooklyn's literary history, and exactly the kind of story this series exists to honor. Get the book.
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