Betty Smith

American · 1896 to 1972

Born Elisabeth Lillian Wehner on December 15, 1896, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, the daughter of first-generation German-American immigrants, her father a waiter, her mother a cleaner, she grew up moving from one tenement to another with her younger brother and sister and settled finally on the top floor of 702 Grand Street, the building that would become the setting of her great novel. She received an A for a school composition at eight and decided then that she would write a book one day. Her mother pulled her out of school at fourteen to go to work, and Smith finished her education in pieces over the next thirty years, taking night classes at Girls' High School in Brooklyn, then at the University of Michigan as a special student, then at the Yale School of Drama in 1933 on a scholarship from George Pierce Baker. She had been writing one-act plays for amateur productions across the Midwest for years when, in 1940, she sat down in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to turn her childhood into fiction. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), the story of Francie Nolan's coming of age in a poor Irish-German family in pre-war Williamsburg, sold more than three hundred thousand copies in its first six weeks and over six million in her lifetime; Elia Kazan adapted it into his first film in 1945. She wrote three more novels, Tomorrow Will Be Better (1948), Maggie-Now (1958), and Joy in the Morning (1963), but the first never let her go. She died of pneumonia on January 17, 1972, at the age of seventy-five, in a Shelton, Connecticut, nursing home where she had moved after a stroke.