Zona Gale(1874-1938)

Writer Zona Gale was born in Portage, WI, on August 26, 1874. She graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1895. She had had an interest in writing from childhood (she printed and bound her first "book" herself at age seven) and after college she obtained work on various newspapers in Milwaukee. In 1901 she got a job s a reporter on the New York World newspaper. She continued to write short stories on the side, however, and in 1904 she had one of them published in "Success" magazine. After that she moved back to Portage (a town she she would later make famous as the locale for her "Friendship Village" series of books). She adapted her novel "Miss Lulu Bett" into a play that was produced on Broadway in 1920, and it won the Pulitzer Price that year (it was made into a film, Miss Lulu Bett (1921), the next year).