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Literary Analysis Of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn

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The Everlasting Tree An American classic is a novel that has beautiful language, complex characters that change throughout the novel and is timeless. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn does just that. Betty Smith, author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, wrote this novel about a young girl’s coming of age during the early 1900’s. Smith wanted to publish a novel that showed the American Dream and the struggles of being poor in America. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is considered an American classic because of its connection to the American Dream, how the hardships of being poor prevented attaining that dream and the impact of Francie being a woman with the injustices she faced. Betty Smith was a German immigrant that lived in Williamsburg-Brooklyn, New York (Johnson). She was a play writer and a novelist at a young age (Johnson) . Smith began her writing career at Ann Arbor and her playwriting career at the Yale School of Drama (Johnson). Her move to North Carolina to become a part of the WPA Federal Theater Project kick started her career as a play writer (Johnson). Her novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, was written over a period of a few years and was based on her own life (Johnson). As soon as it was published in 1943 it became a bestseller instantly and many saw Smith as a major component of literacy in the 1940’s (Johnson). The stress of her overnight success put a considerable amount of pressure on her to write consimore novels (Johnson). She settled in Chapel Hill, NC where she later

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