Smith continued her story of the girl who grew up in Brooklyn in her succeeding three novels, Tomorrow Will Be Better (1948), Maggie-Now (1958), and Joy in the Morning (1963). In each, the central character is a young woman who, recognizing that she is different from the other tenement girls, knows she must control her life so that she succeeds in fulfilling the promise of that difference.

Tomorrow Will Be Better, although not a spectacular best seller like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, nevertheless received fairly good reviews but dropped out of sight, perhaps because its heroine, Margy Shannon, temporarily fails in her quest for happiness. Margy chooses marriage as the only way to improve her life, but the marriage comes apart after she gives birth to a stillborn child and then realizes that her husband, while not quite homosexual, is at least sexually repressed. The homosexual theme had...