Betty Smith :: essays research papers

Betty SmithBetty Smith was born Elisabeth Wehner on celestial latitude 15, 1896. The daughter of German immigrants, she grew up poor in Brooklyn, a foundation where she re-creates in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.Wehner later on hook up with fellow Brooklynite George H.E. Smith, where they moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan, where he was a law student at the University of Michigan. The bride son had two daughters, Nancy and Mary, and had to wait until the girls entered school before endeavoring to complete her give birth education. Although Smith never finished high school, she was permitted to take classes at the university, she centre on her studies in journalism, drama, writing and literature. Smith showing off her cognition won the Avery Hopkins Award for work in drama, and had a three-year course in playwriting at the Yale Drama School.After writing features for a Detroit newspaper, reading plays for the federal Theatre Project, and acting in summer stock, Smith than moved to chapel service Hill, North Carolina under the favors of the W.P.A. She and her eldest husband divorced in 1938. In 1943, she married Joe Jones, a writer, journalist, and associate editor of the Chapel Hill Weekly, man he was serving as a private in the wartime army. That aforesaid(prenominal) year, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, her first novel, was published.The prestige of writing a best-selling, critically lauded a book brought assignments from the New York Times Magazine, which she wrote both light-hearted and adept commentary. In a December 1943 piece called Why Brooklyn is that Way, Smith shown the core of her childhood boroughs unofficial champion.Although most readers remembered for the amazing success of that first book, Smith wrote other novels, including Tomorrow Will Be Better, Maggie-Now, and Joy in the Morning.