A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Themes

“If at first you don’t succeed (we all know the ending here, right?) try, try again.” That could be the mantra of many characters in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Those with the most determinatio...

When she is little, Francie knows the girls who get pinched without saying anything will get an extra penny from the junk guy. She witnesses the disgrace that Sissy’s promiscuity causes the famil...

Being poor is the ever-present backdrop for the characters in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Francie’s neighborhood school is overcrowded, and the teachers don’t even think the poor deserve an educa...

How the heck does Francie do it? She starts A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as one of so many poor kids who have little hope for ever leaving Williamsburg, yet ends the novel as a young lady about to head...

What gets the Nolans out of poverty at the end of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn? What gets Francie into college? While it's partly due to having big dreams, hopes, and plans (you can't really achieve so...

In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the Nolan family is not your picture perfect, made for TV family—well, unless the TV show is more like a reality show, Meet the Nolans or something like that. They’...

Francie starts A Tree Grows in Brooklyn as an eleven year old girl, and then through a flashback, we go even farther back in her life than that. Actually, we go all the way back to when her parents...

There are so many cool details about life in the early 1900s that you learn about when you read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—Shmoop thinks learning history when you aren’t even trying to is a total...