SMITH, Betty (Wehner)

Born 15 December 1896, Brooklyn, New York; died 17 January 1972, Shelton, Connecticut

Daughter of John C. and Katherine Hummel Wehner; married George Smith, circa 1924 (divorced); Joseph Jones, 1943 (divorced); Robert Finch, 1957 (died); children: two daughters

Born and raised in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, Betty Smith attended public schools until the age of fourteen when, having completed eighth grade, she began working at a series of factory and clerical jobs. An avid reader as a young girl, she also wrote poems and acted in amateur productions at the Williamsburg YMCA. Moving to the Midwest, she met and married George Smith, a law student at the University of Michigan, and they had two daughters. She audited literature and writing classes at the university and, although not a regular student, had two plays published in a collection of undergraduate work and won an Avery Hopwood prize.

From 1930 to 1934 Smith studied with George Pierce Baker and others at the Yale Drama School. Smith's first two marriages ended in divorce. After the first divorce, Smith accepted a Rockefeller fellowship in playwriting at the University of North Carolina; she remained in Chapel Hill, writing, occasionally lecturing at the university, and playing small roles in local productions. Her third husband, Robert Finch, a writer with whom she had collaborated on several plays, died about a year and a half after their marriage.

A dramatist by inclination, Smith wrote over 70 plays and edited several collections and texts for drama classes. Most of her plays were not published and none received critical acclaim or even major professional performances. Typical of her plays meant for youth groups or schools are The Boy, Abe and First Sorrows, both about the young Abe Lincoln and the death of his mother. Other one-act plays range in tone from burlesque to sentimentality and in setting from a mid-19th century rural political rally (Freedom's Bird, written with Robert Finch) to the sidewalk in front of an illegal abortionist's office on a late depression era Christmas Eve (So Gracious Is the Time).

Though she preferred drama, Smith won fame through her fiction. Drawing upon her own memories and those of her mother, she expanded an earlier work, "Francie Nolan," into A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1943), her most successful novel. It sold millions of copies and was made into a movie and a Broadway musical. Whereas the plot and much of the writing can be criticized for excessive sentimentality, the strength of this highly autobiographical novel lies in the richness of detail with which Smith recreates a young girl's childhood and adolescence in the slums of early-20th century Brooklyn, including both the pains of a poverty-stricken childhood and the good times. The characters are vivid and three-dimensional; even the minor characters come alive as recognizable types.

Smith's next novel, Tomorrow Will Be Better (1948, in Britain as Streets of Little Promise) is set against the same background as her first, but reviewers were not impressed with this effort; they found the dialogue authentic but the book as a whole less spontaneous and more self-conscious than A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. In Maggie-Now (1958), the character types are similar to those in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—charming, irresponsible men and their long-suffering, hardworking wives and daughters—but this novel too lacks the depth of the earlier one. In her fourth novel, Joy in the Morning (1963), Smith shifted the locale from Brooklyn to a Midwestern college campus. In some ways, this book is a sequel to the first novel, as the heroine, a Brooklyn girl with only a grade school education, marries a law student, audits literature and writing classes, and has her work published in a student collection.

Smith obviously drew heavily upon her own experiences for the material for her novels. Her accurate ear for dialogue (a legacy of her dramatic training) is a strength in all of them. But the wealth of detail in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn may have exhausted her memories. Each of the succeeding books was less rich in characterization and atmosphere. Her greatest weakness, however, was her inability to shape her novels into realistic and meaningful form; thus they tend to be overly sentimental and to end mechanically or without resolution.

Other Works:

Selected: Folk Stuff (1935). His Last Skirmish (1937). Naked Angel (1937). Popecastle Inn (1937). Saints Get Together (1937). Plays for Schools and Little Theaters: A Descriptive List (edited by Smith, with R. Finch and F. H. Koch, 1937). Trees of His Father (1937). Vine Leaves (1937). The Professor Roars (1938). Western Night (1938). Darkness at the Window (1938). Murder in the Snow (1938). Silver Rope (1938). Youth Takes Over; or, When a Man's Sixteen (1939). Lawyer Lincoln (1939). Mannequins' Maid (1939). They Released Barabbas (1939). A Night in the Country (1939). Near Closing Time (1939). Package for Ponsonby (1939). Western Ghost Town (1939). Bayou Harlequinade (1940). Fun After Supper (1940). Heroes Just Happen (1940). Room for a King (1940). Summer Comes to the Diamond O (1940). To Jenny with Love (1941). 25 Non-Royalty One-Act Plays for All-Girl Casts (edited by Smith, 1942). 20 Prize-Winning Non-Royalty One-Act Plays (edited by Smith, 1943). Young Lincoln (1951). A Treasury of Non-Royalty One-Act Plays (edited by Smith et al., 1958). Durham Station (1961).

Bibliography:

Reference works:

CA (1969). CB (1943, 1972). Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995). TCAS.

—ELAINE K. GINSBERG