A Tree Grows in Brooklyn opens on a summer Saturday in 1912, in a Williamsburg tenement neighborhood where a scrappy "Tree of Heaven" grows up through the concrete. Eleven-year-old Francie Nolan and her brother collect junk for pennies, living in poverty but surrounded by warmth. Her father Johnny, a singing waiter, is loving but unreliable and increasingly dependent on alcohol; her mother Katie works as a building janitor in exchange for rent and holds the family together through sheer will.
Over five sections spanning roughly two decades, the novel follows Francie's education — first at a rundown local school, then, through a small deception by her father, at a better one across the neighborhood — and her growing determination to become a writer. Family hardship, including her father's decline, tests the Nolans repeatedly. By eighteen, Francie is preparing to leave for university, looking back at the tree of her childhood, cut down but growing again from the stump, as she says goodbye to the girl she was. First published in 1943, the novel remains one of the most widely read American coming-of-age stories.