A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

5 Pages 1178 Words

Betty Smith: Brooklyn Growth

I. About the Author
Through the many works of her career, Betty Smith became Brooklyn's unofficial advocate and was published to critical acclaim and best-seller status with her commentary of the general struggle through life in the early 1900s. Smith, like her main character, grew up impoverished in early twentieth century Brooklyn and went to the University of Michigan without a high school diploma, where she took literary classes and wrote plays. Smith went on to win the Avery Hopkins Award for work in drama, taught a three-year playwriting course at Yale, wrote features for a Detroit newspaper, worked under the auspices of the Works Project Administration in the Federal Theatre project in New York. Her writings during this period of her career garnered a Rockefeller Fellowship, a Dramatist Guild Fellowship, and the Sir Walter Raleigh award for fiction. As the critics lauded A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (it was the first work of fiction by a woman to occupy first place on the New York Times best seller list), the press and the public fell in love with the working-class celebrity of Betty Smith. Smith’s novels were characteristically by, for, and about the underprivileged and the events, politics, and ideals which surround them. The prestige of writing a best-selling critically lauded book brought assignments from the New York Times Magazine where, among other things, she wrote an acclaimed piece called "Why Brooklyn is that Way." Throughout the years, Smith’s works have garnered numerous critical and literary
praises and has been cited as an influence in many writers and public figures lives. Oprah Winfrey has named it one of the most influential books in her life and has since promoted it in her Book of the Month Club; The New York Public Library even chose the book as one of the "Books of the Century."
Theme: In Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Smith shows the effects of alcoholism, tr...