Zona Gale was born in Portage, Wisconsin. After graduating from the University of Wisconsin in 1895, she worked as a newspaper reporter in Milwaukee, then joined the staff of the New York Evening Post in 1901. Preferring the life of a freelance writer, she left newspaper work to write short stories for such magazines as Harper's Weekly, Smart Set, Woman's Home Companion, and the Outlook. She also expanded her circle of New York literary acquaintances--who included Edmund Clarence Stedman, William Vaughn Moody, Harriet Monroe--to include the poet Ridgely Torrence. Deciding between marrying him or returning to her parents in Portage, she chose in 1904 to break off her engagement and make Portage her permanent home. In 1928 at the age of fifty-four she married William L. Breese, also of Portage. Except for occasional travel she lived there until her death. During her lifetime twenty-two separate volumes of her fiction, four of nonfiction, seven plays, and one book of poetry were published. The dominant theme throughout her writing is that of small-town American people who share hopes, tragedies, frustrations, pettiness, cruelties, and most important, a fundamental solidarity.
Zona Gale's literary work falls into three distinct groups reflecting her interpretation not only of small-town life in America's Middle West but also the philosophical and religious aspects of the human condition. The first period extended from the publication of Romance Island (1906) and The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre (1907) to Peace in Friendship Village (1919). The first two books were hopelessly sentimental efforts to depict, in the first instance, an imaginary island somewhere south of the Azores where supernatural goings-on were stock-in-trade, and, in the second, springtime for two old lovers whose marriage has prevailed over all difficulties. With Friendship Village (1908), a collection of twenty so-called village stories, Gale found the subject that would preoccupy her in many volumes to follow: Friendship Village Love Stories (1909), When I Was a Little Girl (1913), Neighborhood Stories (1914), a Friendship Village novel Mothers to Men (1911), a novella Christmas (1912), and a one-act play The Neighbors, first published in Wisconsin Plays (1914). The subject was the imaginary Wisconsin town of Friendship Village whose inhabitants share a community life Gale idealized as cohesive, harmonious, and decent. This is not to say that its leading citizen, the elderly but shrewd Calliope Marsh, is blind to her neighbors' foibles. But Gale endows her with an instinct for seeing goodness in people and with the energy and optimism to work for civic improvement.
When the last of these Friendship Village books appeared in 1919, a New York Sun reviewer noted that the fictional Calliope was still "a disgustingly good soul." The critic Constance Rourke in the New Republic was more discerning in noticing that the stories led away from contentment, the optimism was less certain, and the satire on civic improvement clubs and philanthropy sharper. Zone Gale had begun to see the dark underside of the village.
Her second literary period marks a shift from saccharine romanticism to the realism of Birth (1918), Miss Lulu Bett (1920), and Faint Perfume (1923). Too much was happening in the world for Gale to stay romantically provincial; she took up the causes of pacificism, women's suffrage, political progressivism, social welfare, ethnic equality, and educational reform. She plunged into state and national politics, fighting tirelessly for Wisconsin's Robert M. LaFollette and his Progressive party and joining countless organizations that sought reform. Hints of her growing restlessness surfaced in Heart's Kindred (1915), a novel whose theme of pacificism alarmed Portage citizenry who had regarded their local author only in terms of sweetness and light. Another hint was the novel A Daughter of the Morning (1917) in which Cosma Wakely, the heroine, escapes intolerable village entrapment only to find factory conditions in the big city worse than what she had left behind. Gale's emerging realism broke out unequivocally in her next novels and secured her place in American literature.
The harshness of life depicted in Birth had its counterpart in Gale's education into political and social muckraking and the terrible guns of 1914-1918 overseas. Her fictional setting is no longer Friendship Village but the town of Burage, equal in grimness to anything E. W. Howe, Edwin Arlington Robinson, Sherwood Anderson, or Sinclair Lewis created. People are buffeted, teased, and ruined willy-nilly by fate. Gale's first victim is Marshall Pitt, a door-to-door salesman, whose wife's lust for fine clothes, bright lights, and glamour resembles that of Theodore Dreiser's Carrie Meeber. Finally abandoned, Pitt heads for Alaska, leaving behind his young son Jeffrey who, many years later, equates his own birth of tragic consciousness with the knowledge of his father's futile struggle to find meaning in life. The second victim is the main character of Miss Lulu Bett, Gale's most successful novel, one that ranks with Edith Wharton's Ethan Frome (1911) and Willa Cather's A Lost Lady (1923). Again the tragedy is the unfulfilled life, specifically that of Lulu Bett, unmarried at thirty-three and trapped as a domestic helper in her married sister's household. The novel is a "hard little picture," Edith Wharton said; the picture delineates monotonous triviality, meanness, hypocrisy. When Gale adapted it for the theater in 1921 she won a Pulitzer Prize. The third victim in Gale's deterministic world is Leda Perrin in Faint Perfume, easily one of the novelist's best works. Like Lulu Bett, Leda is consigned to the role of a domestic in the household of Richmiel and Orrin Crumb, the wife as cunning as the husband is cloddish. Leda's "faint perfume" is the memory of loving words once spoken by the departed Barnaby, Richmiel's first husband, whom Leda secretly loved. Her only spiritual kin in the present household is old grandfather Crumb whose suicide leaves her totally alone, a fragile butterfly never finding freedom.
Gale's third literary period begins with Preface to a Life (1926). Dissatisfied with the philosophical determinism implicit in her realism, she grew interested in religious New Thought movements including Orientalism, mysticism, and so-called higher consciousness. "I lift mine eyes as I write and look upon Gandhi and [P. D.] Ouspensky," she said in 1927. She also looked with interest upon such well-known adherents of Eastern mysticism as Krishnamurti, Georgei Ivanovich Gurdjieff, Rabindranath Tagore, and Madame H. P. Blavatsky. For this 1926 novel Gale conceived of something big happening, specifically Bernard Mead's being lifted into the astral world through powerful thought-suggestions of his dying mother. Mead seeks something more than life's treadmill, a spirit life that Gale suggests by means of a sometimes highly vertiginous prose style. Notwithstanding the psychical realms, Gale continued to live in Portage, the short stories comprising Yellow Gentians and Blue (1927) attesting to this localism. However, her next novel, Borgia (1929), is again fragrant with the not-so-faint perfume of New Thought and cultism, awakening the central character, Marfa, to realize through mystical illumination that whereas she earlier had been an "unharmonious person" she is in reality as perfect as "tree and star." Overall, the arcane theme that marks this literary period is handled with remarkable effectiveness.
Zona Gale's last writings are a potpourri containing her best volume of short stories, Bridal Pond (1930), and, at the other extreme, Old Fashioned Tales (1933), undistinguished stories resurrected from the popular magazines where they first appeared. The stories in Bridal Pond return to realism in a truly minor key, a powerful treatment of guilt, frustration, and madness among the small-town "grotesques." In Papa LaFleur (1933) and Light Woman (1937) Gale's theme is the unbridged gap separating two generations, two worlds of time; and in the posthumously published novel Magna (1939) she laments the absence among the younger generation of mystical love, the only possible bridge. Finally, two volumes of nonfiction deserve mention. Portage, Wisconsin and Other Essays (1928) contains essays about her hometown and her parents as well as matters pertaining to literary theory, the responsibilities of the American writer, and the spirit world. The other book, Frank Miller of Mission Inn (1938), is an account of the founder of the Riverside (California) retreat for persons seeking religious quietude.
Any assessment of Zona Gale's career must include her widespread activity in the social, political, educational, and philosophical issues of her day. She helped to write the 1923 Wisconsin Equal Rights Law; she was Wisconsin's representative to the International Congress of Women in Chicago in 1933; she was a member of the University of Wisconsin's Board of Regents and the recipient of four honorary degrees including one from her alma mater. Yet her literary reputation is that of an accomplished village laureate in whose fiction one finds an assemblage of village people: the menial, the pathetic, the inarticulate, the spiritually awakened, the kind-hearted, the vindictive. Gale's superbly vivid setting is the American small town, the same from which so much of our national literature has sprung.
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