Betty Smith (Born December 15, 1896)

The Tree That Refused to Die

Betty Smith was born into the kind of Brooklyn poverty that most writers only imagine. Her parents were German immigrants. Her father drank. There was never enough money, never enough food, never enough of anything except struggle. She didn’t finish high school.

And yet.

In 1943, at the age of forty-seven, Smith published A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—a novel that would sell millions of copies, be translated into dozens of languages, and become one of the most beloved American books of the twentieth century.

The novel follows Francie Nolan, a girl growing up in the Williamsburg tenements in the early 1900s. Francie is poor, overlooked, hungry for books and beauty in a world that offers precious little of either. The tree of the title is the ailanthus—the “Tree of Heaven”—a stubborn weed of a tree that grows in vacant lots and through cracks in the sidewalk, flourishing where nothing else will.

The metaphor is not subtle. Smith wasn’t interested in subtlety. She was interested in truth.

What makes the novel endure isn’t its plot, which is episodic and meandering. It’s the accumulation of small, precisely observed details: the taste of stale bread softened with condensed milk, the smell of the public library, the humiliation of being sent home from school for lice, the fierce love between sisters, the way poverty shapes not just what you have but who you believe yourself to be.

Smith wrote from experience. Like Francie, she escaped through education and sheer will. She attended college in her thirties, wrote plays, struggled for years before her breakthrough. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was rejected by multiple publishers before finally finding a home.

The book’s message is unfashionable now in certain literary circles—too earnest, too sentimental, too committed to the idea that hard work and determination can lift you out of your circumstances. But Smith never pretended that escape was easy or guaranteed. She simply insisted it was possible. The tree grows not because the soil is good but because the tree refuses to die.

Sometimes that’s enough

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Christopher Hitchens (Died December 15, 2011)

The Man Who Picked Every Fight

Christopher Hitchens died thirteen years ago today, and the world has been duller and less combative ever since.

He was, depending on whom you asked, a brilliant essayist, a fearless polemicist, a charming drunk, an insufferable contrarian, a defender of the Enlightenment, or a warmonger who betrayed his leftist principles. He was, in fact, all of these things. Hitchens contained multitudes, and most of them were arguing with each other.

Born in England, educated at Oxford, he became one of the most recognizable public intellectuals of his era—a man who could write with equal facility about Thomas Paine, Mother Teresa (whom he despised), the case for atheism, or the proper way to make a martini. His prose was lapidary and vicious, erudite and accessible, always readable even when you wanted to throw the book across the room.

He picked fights with everyone: Henry Kissinger, Bill Clinton, God, the royal family, the Catholic Church, Islamic theocrats, and eventually many of his former friends on the left when he supported the Iraq War. He seemed constitutionally incapable of holding a popular opinion if an unpopular one was available.

What made Hitchens worth reading—even when he was wrong, which was often—was his absolute commitment to following an argument wherever it led, consequences be damned. In an age of carefully hedged opinions and strategic silence, he said exactly what he thought in the most provocative way possible. You always knew where he stood because he was standing on your throat.

His memoir, Hitch-22, and his essay collection Letters to a Young Contrarian remain essential reading for anyone who believes that writing should be a contact sport. His final essays, written while dying of esophageal cancer, displayed the same mordant wit and refusal to seek comfort in illusion that had defined his career.

“The one thing I’ve always said,” he once remarked, “is that I’ve tried to take a stand on every issue I’ve ever been asked about.”

He did.