Miss Lulu Bett

In 1920, Miss Lulu Bett was hailed as innovative in several respects and was the first Pulitzer Prize-winning play by a woman. In his foreword to the published play, Robert C. Benchley commented: "Zona Gale is the first author, to my knowledge, who has dared to write genuinely dull dialogue . . . [b]ut Miss Gale saw the truth and kept it whole. She was depicting uninspired American family life (almost for the first time in our literature) and she held fast to the ideals of American family conversation."

Benchley also signaled the originality of the "old lady who is not sweet, and a child who is not cute." Ludwig Lewisohn declared that "no other American dramatist has succeeded in so fully and richly transferring to the stage the exact moral atmosphere of a class, a section, and a period, as Miss Gale."

Zona Gale (August 26, 1874 December 27, 1938) was an American author and playwright. Gale was born in Portage, Wisconsin, which she often used as a setting in her writing. She attended Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, and later entered the University of WisconsinMadison, from which she received a Bachelor of Literature degree in 1895, and four years later a master's degree.

After college, Gale wrote for newspapers in Milwaukee and New York City, for six years. A visit to Portage in 1903 proved a turning point in her literary life, as seeing the sights and sounds
of town life led her to comment that her 'old world was full of new possibilities.' Gale had found the material she needed for her writing, and returned to Portage in 1904 to concentrate full time on fiction. She wrote and published there until her 1938 death, but made trips to New York

In 1928 at the age of fifty-four she married William L. Breese, also of Portage.

Gale died of pneumonia in a Chicago hospital in 1938.

Dettagli