Betty Smith Books in Order

If you want the classic first: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
If you want young love tested by real life: Joy in the Morning
If you want more Brooklyn hardship and hope: Tomorrow Will Be Better → Maggie-Now
If you want a shorter sampler: Wednesdays and Other Stories

Betty Smith was born Elisabeth Lillian Wehner on December 15, 1896, in Brooklyn, and she grew up in Williamsburg in a family that did not have much money. Her parents were Brooklyn-born children of German immigrants, and the crowded tenement streets around her stayed with her for life. Years later, that world would feed directly into A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.

She wanted to write early, but first she had to work. Smith left school after the eighth grade to help support her family, then later tried to continue her education while holding jobs, including night work in Manhattan and a day job with the Postal Service. She also spent as much time as she could in the public library and at cheap Saturday matinees, which helped shape both the reader and the playwright she became.

In her late teens she was active at Brooklyn's Jackson Street Settlement House, where she took classes in acting and playwriting. There she met George H. E. Smith, whom she married in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1919. The couple had two daughters, and while her husband studied law and later political science, Smith pushed her own education forward too, attending high school classes in Ann Arbor and taking writing and journalism courses at the University of Michigan as a special student.

Then playwriting opened a door.

In 1931 she won the Avery Hopwood Award at Michigan for a full-length play, a big break that brought money and attention. The prize led to a fellowship at Yale's drama school, where she studied under George Pierce Baker and wrote more plays. After Yale she worked for the Federal Theatre Project, and in 1936 she went to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, for regional theater work. That move mattered. Chapel Hill became an important home base, and it was during these years that she turned from plays toward fiction.

She wrote what she knew best: working-class Brooklyn, young people growing up fast, and families trying to stay decent under pressure. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, published in 1943, made her name. Its heroine, Francie Nolan, grows up poor but observant, bookish, and stubbornly hopeful in Williamsburg, and readers connected with the book right away. It became a bestseller, was adapted into a film in 1945, and later into a musical.

Her later novels kept returning to some of the same worries, but never in exactly the same way. Tomorrow Will Be Better follows Margy Shannon, a young Brooklyn woman reaching for a life bigger than poverty. Maggie-Now looks at family duty and desire inside a Brooklyn Irish household. Joy in the Morning, published in 1963 and based in part on Smith's own early marriage, follows Annie and Carl through the first hard year of married life while Carl studies law. Readers who stay with Smith tend to like her plain, direct prose, her sharp ear for neighborhood talk, and the way she writes about money, marriage, mothers, and ambition without turning anyone into a saint.

She never lost her feel for the block, the kitchen table, or the rent money.

Smith married three times and kept the surname from her first marriage for the rest of her career. She spent important years in North Carolina, liked fishing, and was known to enjoy bingo, small details that somehow feel right for a writer so alert to ordinary life. She died in Shelton, Connecticut, on January 17, 1972. Her body of work is small, just four novels and later-collected stories, but it has held on because she understood how hope and hardship can live in the same room.