Maggie-Now, By Betty Smith

NORTHEAST. 
Classic Fiction. 

The writer, Betty Smith, was once a household name as common as Stephen King is today. And yet, she achieved this with an economy of work by comparison and much later in life. Betty Smith grew up, Elisabeth Wehner, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn during the first few decades of the 20th century. The area’s rich teeming palette of lives populated by recent immigrant families (her parents recent arrivals from Germany), would seed Smith’s enormously popular and highly relatable debut novel, “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn”. Published in 1943, its extreme popularity benefitted mightily from the USO’s war time books for soldiers program, as well as its 1944 adaptation into a motion picture. It all brought Smith an immense overnight fame. Fifteen years later, “Maggie-Now” would follow a similar pattern in both story and inspiration … Beyond her modest working class upbringing among the brownstones of Williamsburg, Smith’s life followed a pattern typical of the day: a young married mother forced to follow her husband in his career moves, all the while trying to carve out her own identity. Smith’s talent as a writer was clear as early as grade school. But it would take decades of clearing the constricting hurdles of young married life in the 1920s-30s before she was able to act on her talent. She began as a playwright and achieved success enough to land a writer’s role in the widely popular New Deal “Federal Theatre Project”. The job found her relocating to Chapel Hill, home to the University of North Carolina, where she would permanently relocate after divorcing her first husband (while keeping his name). Smith was already in her 40s when her attention pivoted to giving novels a try, her debut about as successful as any in American history. She would write four novels total. “Maggie-Now” is the third, published in 1958. The inside cover begins the summary: “This is the story of Maggie-Now, who grew up with the green young century among the immigrant Irish and Germans of Brooklyn. Maggie-Now was one of the givers of the world; and inevitably she attracted the leaners as a post attracts ivy.” Navigating the world as a giving soul is not for the faint of heart. Smith’s character perseveres despite an unfaithful unreliable husband, by putting her efforts into making sure her younger brother, Denny, who she’d cared for as an infant (her own mother having left the family when Maggie-Now was sixteen), “broke the pattern” to become a worthy soul … [Condition: Used Very Good. This volume wears its years very well. There are only a few slight tears and a single rip along the upper spine of the dust jacket. Though there is slight age discoloration along the book’s page edges, there is no foxing. Only a single bent corner and very minor shelf wear can be found on the volume itself. This volume may have lived its life as a show volume only] … As a bonus, we are including a modern paperback copy of Smith’s most famous work—A Tree Grows In Brooklyn—picked up for a few cents at an estate sale for no extra charge! 

Condition: Used Very Good. 
Fiction. 
Betty Smith. 
Harper & Brothers, 1958. 
Hardcover (First Edition), 437 pgs, 5.75 x 8.5” / 1.75 lb