It makes perfect sense that Betty Smith's favorite St. Joseph spot was Wyeth Hill - an outlook post with rich history and vast views of the city and Missouri River. Because Ms. Smith herself, who died at age 97 Jan. 13, had extensive...

Yes, Virginia, there really is a liberal Republican. The party of Lincoln has strayed far from its traditional moorings, but here in Madison we are blessed with the knowledge that there are indeed Republicans who care about the poor, who support women's...

Today is Monday, Feb. 19, the 50th day of 2007. There are 315 days left in the year. This is Presidents' Day.Today's Highlight in History:On Feb. 19, 1945, during World War II, some 30,000 U.S. Marines began landing on Iwo Jima, where they commenced a...

A 79-year-old Roman Catholic nun pleaded no contest Monday to indecent behavior with a child for alleged sexual encounters with two male students at a church convent and school where she was principal during the 1960s.The nun, Norma Giannini, and her attorney left the courthouse...

The mid-1920's in America are remembered as a time of prosperity and expansiveness, and the literature of those years shows us the Babbitts, the Gatsbys, and the Dodsworths living in a confident and careless country. But ["Tomorrow Will Be Better"] pictures the little people, whose lives are made up of poverty and postponements, in the mean streets and up the dark stairways that prosperity never finds. Through the cycles of economic change they carry their gnawing worries, their secret ...

[Aside] from the paucity of Miss Smith's writing powers, the deficiencies of ["Tomorrow Will Be Better"] are great enough to exclude it from even the most summery of summer readings. The aim to exploit Brooklyn is obvious, but the result fails to communicate any special sense of place…. There is not a single memorable image, no sensory impressions of odors or sounds of Brooklyn and Brooklyn flats, and no real understanding of the squalor of Brooklyn poor. The method used to denot...

In writing another novel about an Irish family in Brooklyn ["Maggie-Now"], Betty Smith has more courage than foresight. Her Brooklyn "Tree"—symbol of all the unsung beauty of the commonplace—has taken root in millions of hearts all over the world. No younger tree planted in the same spot can hope to be so vigorous; inveitably, it will be overshadowed…. If the Nolans were stereotypes; if their strength and weakness, their joy and sorrow appeared in picture-pos...