Zona Gale - A Short Story Collection

By Zona Gale

Zona Gale was born on 26th August 1874 in Portage, Wisconsin. She was exceptionally close to her parents and later used them as the basis for characters in her works.

She wrote and illustrated her first story at the age of 7 and by 16 she was being paid for stories from the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin.

After studies at the University of Wisconsin, where she received a degree and two master's, she moved to New York and a job at the New York World newspaper. She was later hired as a secretary to Edmund Clarence Stedman, the poet, critic, essayist, banker, and scientist. and immersed herself in his literary circle.

Gale returned to Portage in 1903 and realized her old world was full of new possibilities. She now dedicated herself to full-time writing.

Her first novel ‘Romance Island’ was published in 1906 and she also began the popular ‘Friendship Village’ series of stories. In 1920 came ‘Miss Lulu Bett’, which depicts life in the Mid-West. Adapted into a play it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921. It was a stellar achievement.

After the deaths of her parents her works, both fiction and non-fiction, drifted towards mysticism and her belief that problems could be solved through a kind of transcendentalist enlightenment.

Gale was a suffragist, a liberal Democrat, an active member of the National Woman's Party and a pacifist. Much of her time was taken up with advancing opportunities for women both at school and in careers. It was a cause she repeatedly emphasized in her novels: women's frustration at their lack of opportunities.

In the mid 20’s she began caring for a young relative, Leslyn, and later adopted her. At age 54, she married William L Breese, a childhood friend. Now a widower, he was a wealthy banker and hosiery manufacturer. She also became a step-mother to his daughter, Juliette.

In mid-December 1938 she went to Chicago for medical treatment and contracted pneumonia a few days later.

Zona Gale died of pneumonia in Passavant Hospital in Chicago on 27th December 1938. She was 64.

Index of Contents

White Bread,

Friday,

The Dance,

The Way the World Is,

The Prodigal Guest

• Language: English
• Publisher: Miniature Masterpieces
• Release date: Jun 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781803549705

Book preview

Zona Gale - A Short Story Collection

An Introduction

Zona Gale was born on 26th August 1874 in Portage, Wisconsin.  She was exceptionally close to her parents and later used them as the basis for characters in her works. 

She wrote and illustrated her first story at the age of 7 and by 16 she was being paid for stories from the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin. 

After studies at the University of Wisconsin, where she received a degree and two master's, she moved to New York and a job at the New York World newspaper. She was later hired as a secretary to Edmund Clarence Stedman, the poet, critic, essayist, banker, and scientist. and immersed herself in his literary circle.

Gale returned to Portage in 1903 and realized her old world was full of new possibilities. She now dedicated herself to full-time writing.

Her first novel ‘Romance Island’ was published in 1906 and she also began the popular ‘Friendship Village’ series of stories. In 1920 came ‘Miss Lulu Bett’, which depicts life in the Mid-West. Adapted into a play it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921.  It was a stellar achievement.

After the deaths of her parents her works, both fiction and non-fiction, drifted towards mysticism and her belief that problems could be solved through a kind of transcendentalist enlightenment.

Gale was a suffragist, a liberal Democrat, an active member of the National Woman's Party and a pacifist.  Much of her time was taken up with advancing opportunities for women both at school and in careers. It was a cause she repeatedly emphasized in her novels: women's frustration at their lack of opportunities.

In the mid 20’s she began caring for a young relative, Leslyn, and later adopted her. At age 54, she married William L Breese, a childhood friend. Now a widower, he was a wealthy banker and hosiery manufacturer. She also became a step-mother to his daughter, Juliette.

In mid-December 1938 she went to Chicago for medical treatment and contracted pneumonia a few days later.

Zona Gale died of pneumonia in Passavant Hospital in Chicago on 27th December 1938.  She was 64.

Index of Contents

White Bread

Friday

The Dance

The Way the World Is

The Prodigal Guest

White Bread

Every one in the room had promised something. Mis' Tyrus Burns offered her receipt for filled cookies. My filled cookie receipt, she said, is something that very, very few have ever got out of me. I give it to Mis' Bradford—when she moved away. I've give it to one or two of my kin—by word of mouth and not wrote down. And Carol Beck had it from me when she was married—wrote out on note-paper, formal—but understood to be a personal receipt and not general at all. This 'll be the first time I've ever give in to make it public, and nothing on earth but the church carpet would make me now.

Me either, with my Christmas cakes, said Mis' Arthur Port. I've made 'em for fairs and bazaars and suppers, and give the material when needed it for the children's shoes, but I feel like the time had come for the real supreme sacrifice. I'll put 'em in the book with the rest of you.

Mis' Older's salad-dressing, Mis' Eldred's fruit cordial, Mis' Regg's mince-meat, Mis' Emmons's pie-crust—these were all offered up. The basement dining-room of the church was filled with women that spring afternoon, and a spirit was moving among them like a little flame, kindling each one to giving. The place in which they were gathered, its furnace in the corner, its reed melodeon for the Sunday-school, its black-boards, and its locked cupboards filled with dishes which the women had earned when a like flame quickened—this place might have been an austere height where they were face to face with the ultimate purpose of giving, of being. For abruptly children's shoes, parlor curtains, the little hoard accumulating over back on a cupboard shelf became as nothing, and the need to be of use was on them all, like a cry involuntarily answered to a cry. That exquisite reflection of each in each was there, obeying strange laws of repetition and contagion—a gentle, positive power, infinitely stronger than the negative infection of mob violence. It was as if the very church carpet which the receipt-book's sale must buy was but the homely means for the exercise of the mysterious force which moved them.

Save only one. Mis' Jane Mellish sat by the serving-pantry door, no more self-forgetful than when she was in her own kitchen.

What's the book going to be called? she had asked when they had voted to prepare it.

The Katy Town First Church Ladies' Choice Receipt Book, they had finally decided.

How can you call it that if it ain't all the ladies? Jane had inquired further. Some o' the ladies 'ain't got a choice receipt to their names nor their brains.

Such as 'ain't can see to the printing, Mis' Tyrus Burns suggested. Would you druther do that, Jane? she added, tartly.

Jane's lips moved before she spoke—a little helpless way that they had, as if they were not equal to what they must do. Who's going to write the dedication? she asked.

No one had thought of a dedication, but it occurred to no one to question it. And the answer was inevitable.

You'd ought to do that, they said to Jane: For who else of their number had ever published poems in the Katy Town Epitome, and whom else had its editor asked to do special funeral and wedding write-ups?

Jane nodded and hid her relief, and presently faced the question which all along she had been dreading:

Now, bread. We'd ought to have some real special breads, they said. Who's going to do them?

Mis' Holmes's salt-rising bread, Mis' Jacobs's potato-bread, Mis' Grace's half-graham-and-half-rye—these were all offered. It was Mis' Tyrus Burns who said that which they were all thinking. She turned to Jane Mellish.

Land! Jane, she said, what it 'd be to have your white-bread receipt for our volume!

At this a hush fell, and they looked at Jane. For years her white-bread receipt had baffled them all. Nobody made white bread like Jane, and no one could find out how she made it—whether by flour or mixing, or, as some suspected, a home-made lard, or an unknown baking-powder, or a secret yeast packed in occasional boxes from Jane's relatives oversea.