SMITH, Betty.
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.
“Look at everything always as though you were seeing it either for the first or last time: Thus is your time on earth filled with glory": First Edition of A Tree Grows In Brooklyn; inscribed by Betty Smith in the year of publication to American radio broadcaster Kathryn Cravens
New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1943.
$9,800.00
In Stock
Item Number: RRB-150571
* Custom Clamshell Boxes are hand made by the Harcourt Bindery upon request and take approximately 60 days to complete
First edition of Smith's classic first novel. Octavo, original green cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper in the year of publication, "For Kathryn Cravens with regards Betty Smith September, 1943." The recipient, Kathryn Cravens (1898–1991), was an American radio broadcaster, actress, and writer whose career reflected the expanding role of women in mid-twentieth-century media. Known as one of the first female news commentators to broadcast nationwide, she became a respected voice in American radio during the 1930s and 1940s, known for her insightful coverage of contemporary politics and social issues. During World War II, Cravens combined her journalistic skill with her passion for aviation, earning a pilot’s license and using her broadcasts to support the war effort and highlight the contributions of servicemen and women. Very good in a very good first issue dust jacket. From the collection of Kathryn Cravens with her bookplate to the front pastedown.
"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). It was the basis for the 1945 film directed by Elia Kazan, starring James Dunn, Dorothy McGuire, Joan Blondell, and Peggy Ann Garner, who won a Special Academy Award for Outstanding Child Actress of 1945. James Dunn won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in the film.
A Tree Grows In Brooklyn.
$9,800.00
In Stock
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