A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: Curriculum Unit (Novel Series)
(Ten lessons have students focus on historical framework; ...)
Ten lessons have students focus on historical framework; design a t-shirt for the main character; examine literary terms, including setting, characterization, language devices, plot, conflict, theme, symbolism, and imagery; read and react to a graph; analyze societal roles of women and implicit values; think critically and creatively; and write a values comparison. Grades 4-9. (CFL216)
Betty Smith was an American novelist and playwright from New York.
Background
She was born Elizabeth Wehner on December 19, 1896 in Brooklyn, New York, United States, to German immigrants Catherine Hummel and John Wehner. Her father died before she was twelve, and her mother married Michael Keogh, an Irish immigrant.
Education
The economic circumstances of her childhood were terrible, and she had to quit school after the eighth grade so that she could work to help support the family.
Through the mediation of her husband she entered the University of Michigan as a special student (1921-1922 and 1927 - 1931) and took every writing course offered. (Smith never received a degree. ) Playwriting especially appealed to her, and after studying the craft with Professor Kenneth T. Rowe, she won the University's first Avery Hopwood Award (1931).
mith continued her playwriting apprenticeship at the Yale School of Drama. She studied with George P. Baker and John Mason Brown for three years and participated in Federal Theater projects.
Career
After a succession of jobs in Brooklyn and Manhattan and an attempt to enroll in college (unsuccessful), Smith left Brooklyn at age seventeen.
For her prizewinning play, "Francie Nolan, " she was awarded $1, 000, a large sum for those days, and it allowed the family to move to New Haven, Connecticut.
The family moved to Detroit in 1934, where Smith wrote for the Detroit Free Press and acted in summer stock. After divorce Smith persisted in writing for a living. With the encouragement of the dramatist Paul Green, she and her children moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1936. There, at the University of North Carolina, Smith subsisted on Rockefeller and Dramatists Guild fellowships as well as on small amounts of money earned as a bit player in local productions.
In 1938, Smith started to work on her first novel. In 1942, Harper and Brothers announced a nonfiction contest to which Smith submitted her 1, 000-page manuscript. It impressed the editors, who urged her to complete it as a novel. Severely trimmed, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was accepted for publication in 1943 and catapulted Smith to fame and fortune. In just six weeks, 300, 000 copies were sold. The New York Times critic Orville Prescott called it "the best first novel I have seen in many a moon. "
During the late 1940's, Smith was a member of the faculty of the University of North Carolina (1945 - 1946), served as judge of the Hopwood Drama Contest, championed the cause of polio research, and traveled to Switzerland to work on scripts for the films The Search (1948) and School Bus.
Although all her books were commercial successes and enjoyed a measure of critical acclaim, the reviewers grew less and less enchanted with the author's later efforts. Both Tomorrow Will Be Better (1948) and Maggie-Now (1958) were set in Smith's vanished Brooklyn, and the last, Joy in the Morning (1963), was a reworking of her experiences as a young, naive wife in a midwestern college town.
After the death of her third husband, Smith devoted herself to writing and teaching; she taught creative writing at the University of North Carolina beginning in 1961. In her last years, she disappeared from the public's awareness.
At the time of her death in a convalescent home in Shelton, Connecticut, she left an unfinished manuscript of an autobiography, which was never published.
(Ten lessons have students focus on historical framework; ...)
Religion
Her writing was influenced by her reading of the American naturalist writers Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and especially Thomas Wolfe, whose 1935 novel Of Time and the River was the catalyst, Smith said, that released her childhood memories.
Modest clipping files of articles, reviews, and obituaries exist in the author's hometown in the Brooklyn Local History Collection (Brooklyn Public Library) and in the Brooklyn Historical Society.
Interests
Writers
Theodore Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe
Connections
In 1913 or 1914, she married George H. E. Smith, a childhood friend from Brooklyn whom she followed to the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, where he attended law school. They had two children. Her marriage ended in 1938.
In 1943, Smith married Joseph Piper Jones, a newspaperman whom she met while he was serving in the army. They had no children and were divorced in 1951.
In 1957, Smith married her third and last husband, Robert Finch, a friend who had written plays with her many years before. He died in 1959.