Zona Gale (Playwright): Zona Gale was born in Portage, Wisconsin, on August 26, 1874, the only child of Eliza and Charles Gale. Both parents would encourage her literary aspirations. But her passion for writing was very much her own. “I wrote when I should have been studying: I wrote through recess, and took home my tablets and wrote.” In 1891, when she was seventeen, “Both” was the first of her stories to be published, by The Evening Wisconsin. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1895, Ms. Gale moved to Milwaukee, where she became a reporter at the Milwaukee Journal. Like most women of the period, she covered flower shows, women’s club meetings, and the weddings of socially prominent brides; occasionally she also interviewed theatrical figures and reviewed plays.

Discontented with her prospects at the Journal and the rejections for the fiction she continued to send out, in 1901 she moved to New York, where she became a reporter at The New York Evening World. There she found a market for her stories and published her first novel, Romance Island (1906), and several collections of increasingly popular short stories. By the time she won first prize in a short-story contest, it had become evident that she was earning a comfortable income from her writing, and in 1912 she returned to Portage. She would return to New York for a portion of every year, which coincided with a growing interest in social activism.

She became a feminist, a pacifist, a liberal, and a supporter of the progressive Wisconsin senator Robert LaFollette. As a dedicated advocate of women’s rights, Ms. Gale helped to draft and successfully campaigned for passage of the Wisconsin Equal Rights Law. She was a prominent supporter of the Wisconsin Woman Suffrage Association and the National American Woman Suffrage Association. A founding member of the Women’s Peace Party, she served as the national chairwoman of the Civic Department of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs as well as an executive board member of the American Civic Association. She was an early conservationist, a member of the American Civil Liberties Union and the Society for the Advancement of Colored People, and an opponent of capital punishment. As earnest as she was about her many causes, her sense of humor did not desert her. When a student at one of her lectures asked if she was ever ashamed of anything she wrote, she replied “Not as often as I should be.” In the Atlantic Monthly she wrote wryly of the state of coeducation: “Women have minds, too.”

Encouraging young writers was also one of her missions. She established the Zona Gale Scholarship for talented University of Wisconsin students. “I have a theory that behind every artist there is another artist”. The “passing on of talent” was a passion of hers.

By 1920, Ms. Gale had published two novels that most reviewers welcomed as a major and positive change in her subject matter and prose style from sentimentalism to a spare, effective realism. Birth (1918) was a critical success; Miss Lulu Bett (1920) as an over-whelming commercial success as well. Miss Lulu Bett made a strong impression on Brock Pemberton, (an up and coming Broadway producer), who persuaded Ms. Gale to dramatize the novel. She wrote the adaptation and sent it to him in ten days. Pemberton went into production at once, and the play opened to good reviews at the Belmont Theater on December 27, 1920 with a cast that included William Holden as Dwight and Carroll McComas as Lulu.

As originally produced, the play concluded differently from the novel, as Lulu leaves the Deacon household to make her own way in the world as best she can. It was a feminist ending, but not the one that audiences wanted. After less than a week, Ms. Gale reworked the 3rd Act to create what she termed the “inartistic happy ending”, which reunited Lulu with her original husband. Zona was untroubled by the critical clamor surrounding her reworking of the 3rd Act and answered her critics in the pages of The Literary Review, Feb. 19, 1921; “The only reason for an unhappy ending must spring from the internal evidence of the material in the book or play itself. If any violence is to be done to the theme or characterizations by a happy ending, it is far preferable, of course to kill everybody. But, if theme and characterization can be worked out and at the same time events be left to flower as life often flowers, then let the flowers bloom!”

Miss Lulu Bett ran at the Belmont for 7 months, was made into a silent film in 1921, and went out into the country on a long successful National Tour. (It’s actual first performance was at Sing Sing, on December 26, 1920 as the annual Christmas play to entertain the inmates in Ossining) Zona Gale was awarded the 1921 Pulitzer prize of $1000 “for the original play of the year, Miss Lulu Bett, which, it is said best presents the potential virtue of the stage in raising the standard of good morals, good taste and good manners”.

Zona Gale, now a famous and wealthy woman married in 1928 for the first time, at the age of 54. She married long time friend William Breese and they both brought adopted children to the marriage. To the end of her life she was an eminent person. The last known photograph of her is at the 1938 Green Bay Peace Conference sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. It seems fitting that in this group picture, she is standing next to Eleanor Roosevelt. She died in December of 1938, of pneumonia.

(Excerpts from Miss Lulu Bett and Selected Stories, edited by Barbara H. Solomon & Eileen Panetta, Anchor Books 2005)