Betty Smith

Elisabeth Wehner, who wrote under the name Betty Smith, was born in 1896 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, into a poor family of German origin. She left school at fourteen to work in a factory. Without a secondary-school diploma, she audited courses at the University of Michigan, won a prize for dramatic writing there in 1931, then studied theatre at Yale. A play reader for the Federal Theatre, she settled in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in 1936. She wrote more than seventy one-act plays and four novels. She died in Connecticut in 1972.

In the catalogue 1

• NovelA Tree Grows in BrooklynBetty Smith · 1943Literature