Miss Lulu Bett and Selected Stories

The short novel Miss Lulu Bett, by Wisconsin-born Zona Gale, shared the top spot on the 1920 bestseller list with Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street. Already a well-known short story writer, Gale had left Wisconsin and moved to New York City, where she lived as a single woman and earned a living by her pen. (Gale married late in life and raised two adopted children; she died in 1938.) The year after Miss Lulu Bett was published, she adapted her novel into a play, which ran on Broadway and won Gale the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921. She was the first woman to win the prize. For reasons lost to time and fashion, Gale’s work fell out of print for many decades.