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Betty Smith. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
New York: Harper & Brothers, (1943). Octavo, original dust jacket. $4800.
First edition of the classic coming-of-age novel, the story of Francie Nolan, a
thoughtful girl “made out of thin invisible steel” struggling to make her way in
the tenements of Williamsburg: “Brooklyn. It’s a magic city and it isn’t real . . .
it’s like a dream of being poor and fighting.” A bestseller at home, Smith’s novel
was wildly popular with American troops overseas. So many soldiers requested
“that Brooklyn tree” that a second edition of the Armed Services paperback
was issued in 1944, “a first for the project.”
Paule Marshall. Brown Girl, Brownstones.
New York: Random House, (1959). Octavo, original dust jacket. $450.
First edition of Paule Marshall’s groundbreaking novel of West Indian immigrants
in Brooklyn between the wars. Growing up in Stuyvesant Heights (now Bedford-
Stuyvesant), Selina Boyce is torn between her striving mother and her escapist
father, who dreams of returning to Barbados: “You
can
go home again. But it
costs.”
Brown Girl, Brownstones
earned Marshall a Guggenheim upon publication,
but it was the novel’s reissue two decades later that secured its reputation, as
Marshall’s unsparing depiction of second-generation identity politics appealed
to a new and wider readership.
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