'A Tree Grows in Brooklyn' at 80

Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943) turns 80 years old this year. The enduringly best-selling novel follows the travails of an Irish American family navigating and eventually overcoming poverty in the slums of Brooklyn before the first World War. Smith’s novel is valuable for its unique and rich depiction of the 1910’s Brooklyn landscape. But aside from bringing to vibrant life long-forgotten tenement buildings, shops, and people, the book has something to teach readers today about why educated elites, on both the right and the left, fail to understand working-class and poor Americans.