In the late 1930s, Smith began to shift her attention from play writing to attempting a novel. Encouraged by her longtime friend, playwright Bob Finch, as well as her writing group, she turned her eye toward a milieu with which she was familiar: the tenements and streets of Brooklyn. In total, Smith wrote four published novels during her lifetime, three of which take Brooklyn as a setting. Her first novel,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, was published in 1943. The book became an immediate bestseller and catapulted Smith to fame. Four years later, in 1947, the novel
Tomorrow Will Be Better appeared. It would be another 11 years before
Maggie-Now, her third book, was published in 1958. Smith's fourth and final novel,
Joy in the Morning appeared in 1963.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn While living and working in Chapel Hill, Smith produced a novel with the working title of
They Lived in Brooklyn. The work was rejected by several publishers before Harper and Brothers showed an interest in 1942. Working with Harper editors Smith substantially revised the novel, trimming characters, dialogue, and scenes, while selectively adding others. Finally, the book was accepted for publication and was released in 1943 with the title,
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Smith later acknowledged the novel and its heroine Francie Nolan were largely based on her own life and experiences. The novel is often categorized under the
Bildungsroman literary genre. In 1944,
20th Century Fox adapted the novel into a film directed by theater director
Elia Kazan.
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn starred
James Dunn,
Dorothy McGuire,
Joan Blondell, and
Peggy Ann Garner, who won a Special
Academy Award for Outstanding Child Actress of 1945. James Dunn's performance as Johnny Nolan, Francie's father, won him the
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. The film also received a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay. During WWII, American publishers produced the
Armed Services Editions of books to be sent to soldiers fighting overseas. Hundreds of works ended up in the hands and hearts of servicemen, but reportedly "the most popular book of all seems to have been
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn." So popular that Betty Smith received "some fifteen hundred letters" every year from soldiers. And as noted below, she would marry a serviceman and editor in 1943. In 1974, a second
film adaptation was released. In the early 1950s, Smith teamed with
George Abbott to write the book for the 1951 musical adaptation of
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
Tomorrow Will Be Better Smith's second book,
Tomorrow Will Be Better, was published in 1947. Set in the tenements of 1920s Brooklyn, the novel presents a realistic portrayal of young adults who seek a brighter future. Published just four years after
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the second book naturally drew critical comparisons to the first because both novels dealt with family life in Brooklyn and the struggle with poverty. Margy Shannon, the central character in
Tomorrow Will be Better, is from a poor family with a dominant mother. She meets and is courted by Frankie, a fellow Brooklynite, also contending with poverty. They strive to improve their lot, attempting to overcome the many personal and financial obstacles in their way.
Tomorrow Will Be Better was published to mixed reviews. It received a positive notice in
The New York Times, which noted the work is noticeably different in spirit from Smith's first book and praised Smith's writing style as "remarkable for its unpretentiousness—an easy, tidy, direct kind of prose which calls no attention to itself". Other reviews, however, were less warm, often judging the novel as "gloomy".
Maggie-Now Smith's third novel
Maggie-Now was published in 1958.
Joy in the Morning Joy in the Morning, Smith's fourth, and last, novel appeared in 1963. The novel was adapted into the 1965
film of the same name. ==Personal life==