Brooklyn became a best-seller and was twice adapted for film, as a theatrical release directed by Elia Kazan in 1945 and as a television movie in 1974. Though the story was disqualified from the contest, Harper & Brothers agreed to publish it as a novel. In May 1942, she submitted the manuscript for Harper & Brothers’ 125th Anniversary Nonfiction Contest, obscuring the fact that the it was a novel, though it was closely based Smith’s life and family. She also turned her manuscript into a play. In 1942, she submitted an early version of Brooklyn to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a script, but the story failed to generate interest at the movie studio. Smith divorced her first husband in 1938. In 1934, she moved to New York City with her two daughters, Nancy and Mary, to work for the Federal Theater.
After winning the university’s Avery Hopwood Award for playwrighting, she enrolled at Yale Drama School and completed a three-year course but never earned a degree, due to not having a high school diploma. At Michigan, Smith wrote numerous articles, short stories, and plays. Born to German immigrants and raised in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Smith never finished high school but was allowed to attend the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor as a special, non-degree seeking student after her first husband, George H.E.
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