Years before Betty Smith published her best-selling, semi-autobiographical novel, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” she gained her voice as a writer at the University of Michigan.
Smith arrived in Ann Arbor in the 1920s, along with her first husband, George Smith, who was a student at the Law School. Intellectually curious, Betty Smith enrolled at Ann Arbor High School to finish her secondary education — and, when she could, snuck into the university’s drama, writing, journalism and literature courses to see what the students were learning there.
It was on campus that professor Kenneth Thorpe Rowe first noticed Smith and invited her to audit his playwrighting class. Rowe would later establish himself as a notable mentor to U-M students, including helping develop the talents of playwright Arthur Miller and movie director Lawrence Kasdan.
In Smith, Rowe might have seen potential as well, as he reportedly taught her the basics of playwrighting and story construction and encouraged her to draw inspiration from events in her own life.
Under Rowe’s tutelage, Smith wrote at least two plays, including one called “Francie Nolan” about a young girl who grows up poor in Brooklyn, just as Smith had. The play was well-received, garnered Smith U-M’s prestigious Avery Hopwood Award in 1931, and served as an early draft of what would later become her most well-known novel, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn,” published in 1943.
Although Smith left Ann Arbor in the early 1930s to study playwrighting at Yale (she later moved to New York and North Carolina), she did presumably return to her years at U-M when she wrote her last novel, “Joy in the Morning,” published in 1963.
Set in a college town, “Joy in the Morning” tells the story of a young woman named Annie McGairy, who is married to a law student and decides to audit an undergraduate playwrighting course. In the class, she finds writing confidence when the professor praises her work. Smith died in 1972 at the age of 75.
