A Tree Grows In Brooklyn. by Smith, Betty - 1943

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1943. First edition of the author's classic first novel. Octavo, original green cloth. Inscribed by the author, "To May Preston with regards Betty Smith." A near fine copy in a near fine first issue dust jacket with one small chip professionally restored. Housed in a custom half morocco clamshell box. A nice copy of a novel rarely enountered signed or inscribed. "Forty years before Holden Caulfield abandoned Pencey Prep to begin his ill-fated Manhattan odyssey, Francie Nolan struggled to obtain an education in the teeming tenement neighborhood of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Francie grows up nurtured by the loving gallantries of her father, a singing waiter who drinks too much, and the rigorous austerities practiced by her brave mother, a janitress who reads to her children each night from the complete plays of Shakespeare and the 'Protestant Bible'. The book was an instant best-seller, with 300,000 copies purchased in the first six weeks. Writing in the Yale review, Orville Prescott praised A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as a 'rich and rare example of regional local color writing, filled to the scuppers with Brooklynese, Brooklyn folk-ways and Brooklyn atmosphere" (New York Public Library Books of the Century, 207).