Gale, Zona

Related Category: American Literature: Biographies

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).