"The Hungry Artist: Rereading Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows In Brooklyn"
https://hudsonreview.com/2021/10/the-hungry-artist-rereading-betty-smiths-a-tree-grows-in-brooklyn/
I’ve also talked with readers who grew up in Virginia, in Minnesota, in Chicago, in California—people who are African American, Hispanic, Pakistani—the book’s appeal cuts across class and racial lines, even across gender: during World War II, in an Armed Force Services Edition, it reached thousands of men overseas. One letter to Smith tells of 200 soldiers on a waiting list for the book; another suggests the novel’s ability to evoke strong feeling:
The other day the book came and I started to read and just couldn’t stop. When it got dark I read by flashlight in a dugout and for those hours I was carried away, my heart was light with the Nolans’ triumphs and a thing I thought impossible, so impossible it never entered my mind was that I actually cried at the description of Francie’s and Neeley’s grief when John died.
Surely a book whose impact is so deep and so wide deserves more than cursory dismissal by scholars and critics of literature.
Joyce Zonana
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