The tenements have been replaced with housing developments, but its main thoroughfares, if you look above the storefronts, are much the same as they were for Francie. I avoided the book, though I always liked the 1945 film adaptation, directed by Elia Kazan, its plot reworked intelligently by the novelist and screenwriter Tess Slesinger and her husband, Frank Davis, who sharpened the character of the mother and shortened the time frame. It was a girl's book, and I preferred the swashbuckling novels of Rafael Sabatini and books about collies or German shepherds. From them I moved on to Look Homeward, Angel and never returned to ''adolescent'' literature. But then again maybe the book has grown better since its first appearance.
Some books do.
Certainly, the novel has grand ambitions. It is nothing less than a portrait of the artist as a young girl, and Smith set out not only to record a young life but to show where a writer's ambition and will come from. It is a story of triumph over adversity. Francie, spat upon, ridiculed, molested, betrayed by her first love, trusts her imagination to save her. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is Francie's revenge.