Zona Gale

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Zona Gale (August 26, 1874 – December 27, 1938) was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright.

In 1921, she became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Early life and education

Gale was born in Portage, Wisconsin, on August 26, 1874, to Eliza Beers Gale and Charles Franklin. She was extremely close to her parents, who were the inspiration for the "charming elderly couple" in her book The Loves of Pelleas and Etare. At the age of 7, she began writing and illustrating stories. Since she didn't know how to write yet, her first story was published in pencil, and the manilla pages were tied into a book bound by a ribbon.

When she was sixteen, Gale wrote "Bob" in the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin and was paid $3 for the tale. She attended Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, before transferring to the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a Bachelor of Literature or Library Science degree in 1895. She earned a master's degree in Library Science in 1899 and another master's degree in 1901. Her poems were first published in university journals as a student. In 1929, she received an honorary degree from the University of Wisconsin.

Personal life

She met Ridgely Torrence in New York in 1902, with whom she developed a "deeply felt spiritual passion," but she returned to her family when deciding whether to stay in New York or return to Portage. In 1906, the first building of a house for her and her parents began. She grew up in Portage along the Wisconsin River.

In 1923, her mother died. She began caring for Leslyn, a girl who was a cousin, in 1926. In 1931, she was officially adopted her. William L. Breese, a platonic friend from her youth and a widower, married her on June 12, 1928, at the age of 54. He was a wealthy banker and hosiery manufacturer. After their marriage, they lived in a house on MacFarlane Road in Portage. Juliette Blackman Breese, William's daughter who married Cecil Bennett in 1930, became a stepmother. In 1929, her father died. After the death of her parents, she became interested in philosophy.

She loved traveling to California, New York, Japan, and other places. Gale, a frequent visitor to the Mission Inn Hotel in Riverside, California, became a friend of Frank Augustus Miller, the hotel's founder.

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Career

After college, Gale wrote for Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin. She got the job by showing up at the city editor's desk each day. After two weeks, the city editor asked her to write a story about a flower show. After a total of six weeks, she was given a job on the paper. In 1896, she worked for the Milwaukee Journal. She went to New York City in 1901 and applied to get on every paper in the city. To get a job, she prepared a list of story ideas relevant for that day for the New York World and persisted until she got two assignments, and then a job.

Hired as a secretary to Edmund Clarence Stedman, she met people from his literary circle, including Ridgely Torrence, with whom she would have a relationship, and Richard Le Gallienne. She returned to her hometown in 1903 and saw it in a new light that changed her direction as a writer. She found that her "old world was full of new possibilities." She returned to Portage permanently in 1904, where she wrote her stories full-time.

She published Romance Island, her first novel, in 1906, and began the popular "Friendship Village" series of stories which were thought to be based upon Portage, although Gale stated that Friendship Village was not based upon any one town, but typical of a small town. She won first prize, worth $2,000, in 1910 for "The Ancient Dawn" in the short fiction contest by the Delineator. In 1920, she published the novel Miss Lulu Bett, which depicts life in the Midwestern United States after spending time at Bonnie Oaks. Her novel, appreciated for its realism, was compared to the works of Sinclair Lewis and Theodore Dreiser. She adapted it as a play, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921. For the time, she had a rare skill in the way she wrote about common daily experiences of ordinary people in a small town. Her early works were considered sentimental, but also, like Jane Austen's work, in touch with the deeper meanings of her character's expressions during tea-table banter. Frederick Tabor Cooper said, "We bask for a few hours in that human exhilarating sunshine that radiates straight from the heart of people who are real and true and big of soul."

Preface to Love, published in 1926 was based on a new-found mysticism that grew after the death of her mother in 1923 and her father in 1929. The main character mistakes his inner wisdom and mysticism for madness. She published essays based upon mysticism. In these works, people's problems could be solved through a kind of transcendentalist enlightenment. Critics, who did not enjoy her book and essays, viewed her work unfavorably from that point forward, even when she tried to return to realism.

She wrote a book about a friend, Frank Augustus Miller, the founder of the Mission Inn Hotel, after his death in 1935. The biography, titled Frank Miller of Mission Inn, was published in 1938. Throughout her career, she wrote under her maiden name, Zona Gale.

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