In 1921 Zona Gale became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize in drama. For many, this event constitutes her primary claim to lasting significance as a dramatist, especially considering that her output as a novelist and short-story writer far exceeds the handful of plays she wrote and adapted. Only three of her seven plays received professional productions, and only one, Miss Lulu Bett (first performed in 1920), was considered a hit. Gale, however, deserves a place in theater history not only for her Pulitzer but also for the complex, sometimes conflicting ways in which her plays, like her fiction, capture the shifting currents of her times. Just as her own life balanced contradictions (she was both an educated professional and an obedient daughter, an outspoken social progressive and a small-town spinster), her writings also present complexities, mingling old-fashioned sentimentalism with thoroughly modern characterizations and situations.

Zona Gale was...