Joy in the Morning

Joy in the Morning is a novel by the American writer Betty Smith, published in 1963 and set in 1927.

Annie marries partly to get away from a stepfather who has been abusing her, and she arrives in a midwestern college town where she knows nobody and has to learn cooking, budgeting and housework from the people around her. Carl is a law student who must earn enough to keep both of them in school, and the dean, doubtful at first about the marriage, becomes the couple's ally as he sees how hard the two of them work. The novel deals with poverty without making it picturesque, and with the ordinary business of a marriage between two very young people who are determined to make it last. Smith had married young herself, and the book stays close to her own experience of doing so.

It was written after the author's most famous novel, and it returns to the Brooklyn and college-town settings she knew from her own youth and her own early marriage.