A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

Francie Nolan grows up poor in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the years before the First World War, in a family held together by her mother’s hardness and undone by her father’s drinking. The novel’s engine is small and specific: a library card, a tin-can bank nailed into a closet, a tree that keeps coming up through the pavement. Its place in a curriculum meant to form citizens is that it treats literacy and stubborn thrift as the actual mechanics of getting out, rather than as morals appended to the story.

Context: Betty Smith (1896-1972) was born to German immigrant parents in the neighbourhood she wrote about; the novel was her first and was an immediate best-seller on publication in 1943.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the 468-title curriculum this card came from; listed in the Ages 13-99+ band under Fiction.
• Betty Smith — the author.
• New York City — the city the book anatomises.
• Poverty — the condition the book refuses to soften.
• Reading — literacy as the escape route in the story.
• Education — the formation the book is about.
• American Dream — the promise the book measures against what actually happened.