The New York Public Library named A Tree Grows in Brooklyn one of its Books of the Century.

Blackstone is pleased to present a new reading of this moving American classic about a young girl coming of age at the turn of the century.

Francie Nolan lived with her family in the Williamsburg slums of Brooklyn from 1901 until 1918. Francie and her brother, Neeley, knew more than their fair share of privations. This story tells how Francie, an imaginative, alert, and resourceful child, grows up under the burden of suffering that is the lot of a great city’s poor.

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn created a stir when first published in 1943. Some members of genteel society were alarmed by the author’s frankness in writing about life’s squalor, but the humor and pathos of the book ensured its place in the literature of America.