A_Tree_Grows_In_Brooklyn

A Tree Grows In Brooklyn 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 family, brooklyn, life, grows, tree, smith, new, francie, york, story, first, father, book, works, work, through, smith’s, neely, katie, francie’s, century, betty, although, after, young, wrote, writing, twentieth, times, throughout, sociologists, sissy, shows, read, public, one