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Recently: Women writers wooed by Chapel Hill

Posted on January 10, 2008January 14, 2008 by Staff

Valerie Yow holds the biography she wrote about Betty Smith while standing in front of the painting she created depicting A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. The child in the painting, Francie, represents Smith in the near-autobiography she wrote while living in Chapel  Hill. Photo by Valarie Schwartz.

By Valarie Schwartz

Two women came to Chapel Hill to write books. . . .

Betty Smith, a petite brunette Brooklyn native, arrived in 1936 with two adolescent daughters. She had already risen from the brutal poverty of a childhood that included having to quit school after seventh grade to support her mother, brother and sister following the death of her alcoholic father, to marry a law student with political ambitions. While he studied law, she attended enough college courses to earn a degree — but couldn’t because she had no high school diploma.

Determined since childhood to be a writer, she accepted an invitation to study with a renowned playwright at Yale after winning an award for a play she wrote. It became the tipping point for her fragile marriage.

Valerie Yow, a petite blonde Greensboro native, arrived in 1991 after raising two daughters during a career of writing plays and books while teaching history at an Illinois university. After her marriage ended, she felt North Carolina calling her home and bought a cottage from a friend in the town where she’d long hoped to live.

In 1943, seven years after her arrival, Smith wrote a best-selling, very autobiographical novel, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, that was made into a movie, adapted into a Broadway musical and has been reprinted numerous times, most recently in 2006.

Yow blossomed into an artist and has now authored six books, the latest of which, released this month, is Betty Smith, Life of the Author of A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Wolf’s Pond Press).

Last September, my neighborhood book club voted to make A Tree Grows in Brooklyn our February selection — chosen because it met two parameters for selection: it was written by a local author and is a classic. Yow contacted me about her book in December, and I’ve now read both and am left impressed by the strength and courage of two women who, bolstered by talent, followed their hearts to produce meaningful literature.

Yow’s book about Smith paints a fresh picture of Chapel Hill from 1936 through the early 1970s (Smith died Nov. 7, 1973). Smith knew about Chapel Hill because Frederick Koch, then chair of the dramatic arts program at the university, had been an early student of the Yale professor she had learned under. Koch’s department had earned national acclaim for the statewide people’s theater movement he created. She also knew that Paul Green, a philosophy professor who had won a Pulitzer in 1927 for Abraham’s Bosom, taught in the drama program. While touring with a Federal Theater group that performed in Raleigh, she took the bus to Chapel Hill and brazenly (for the day) approached Koch, who called Green into the meeting, where both men agreed to pursue grants that would allow Smith to work for the Federal Theater Project at the University of North Carolina.

A few months later, Smith returned from New York by train with her youngest daughter, Mary, who asked her mother how long they would stay here.

Yow writes, “Betty replied, ‘Forever.’ And so she did: this was the town where Betty Smith lived the second half of her life.”

Smith’s life would shine the spotlight on her adopted hometown, bring a movie premiere to Franklin Street on May 5, 1965, when Joy in the Morning (adapted from her fourth book) opened, and provide fodder for gossips.

It was another Betty — Betty Hodges — former literary editor for the Durham Herald, who suggested that Yow write about Smith. Hodges had also suggested the first book Yow wrote about a woman writer, a book published in 1999 about Bernice Kelly Harris. “I loved the research and writing that biography,” Yow said.

And so it became with the seven-year Smith experience.

“I was reluctant at first to write about this feisty, black-haired novelist,” Yow said. “But I read her three novels and read Tree again.” The resonance led Yow to research, where she found plenty of documents in the Wilson Library and many people who knew Smith and wanted to talk about her.

“She wrote Tree in Chapel Hill,” Yow said. “I think she needed the ambience of Chapel Hill.”

Meet Yow and hear readings from the book at 7 p.m., Jan. 17 at Market Street Books in Southern Village. She will also read at McIntyre’s Fine Books at 7 p.m. Jan. 31.

Contact Valarie Schwartz at 923-3746 or valariekays@mac.com

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