Gale, Zona

Gale, Zona, 1874–1938, American novelist and short-story writer, b. Portage, Wis., grad. Univ. of Wisconsin, 1895. After five years (1899–1904) of newspaper work in Milwaukee and New York City, she returned to her home town, determined to win success as a fiction writer. Of her bleak, realistic novels of life in the Middle West, Birth (1918), Miss Lulu Bett (1920), and Papa La Fleur (1933) won much attention in their time. Her dramatization of Miss Lulu Bett won the Pulitzer Prize in 1921. Among her other novels are Faint Perfume (1923) and Light Woman (1937).

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Gale, Zona (1874–1938) writer; born in Portage, Wis. She spent most of her life in Wisconsin. She worked briefly as a journalist, but attracted attention as a writer with her early "local color" stories of village life. The fiction of her middle years was realistic; her best-known work, Miss Lulu Brett (1920), was notable for depicting the harshness of Midwestern life. In her later fiction she dealt with more abstract themes and in later years she was a public advocate of pacifism and women's suffrage.