Sources on Donald Ogden Stewart

The Making of a Humorist, by DONALD OGDEN STEWART, suppressed by the author, 1921.

My Naval Career, by DONALD OGDEN STEWART (Privately unpublished, 1921).

14. Miss Zona Gale

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NO one any longer doubts that Zona Gale belongs in the very small company of American women novelists whose work is of the first artistic importance. Her history is interesting. Of old New England parentage, she was born in Portage, Wisconsin, where she now lives. She wrote, at thirteen, a novel “which almost simultaneously came back to me from a publisher.” At sixteen, just after she had entered the University of Wisconsin, she submitted a 3,000-word short story to the Milwaukee Evening Wisconsin, which paid her $3. When she finished college she went to work for that newspaper. “I secured a position by attrition. I presented myself every morning at the desk of the city editor. At the end of two weeks the city editor let me write about a flower show. I have never put such emotion into anything else I have written.” She was another month getting on the staff. Later, by offering a list of suggestions based on the day’s news, she succeeded after many weeks in getting on the staff of the New York World.

An anonymous writer in The Bookman has pictured Miss Gale in New York: “When she was a reporter on the World, and as beautiful as any girl could be, she was put on difficult assignments that might well have terrified one as fragile and flower-like and feminine as she; but she never winced.... She covered murders and robberies—anything given her to do she did, at any hour of the day or night. But all the while she was writing exquisite poetry; and every day of her life she sent a letter to her mother, who was back in Wisconsin. If she was waiting for an interview with some financier of the hour, she did not dawdle her time away in the corridor of his hotel. Instead, she pulled out a pad and pencil and wrote as many pages as she could on a short story; or she dashed off a lyric; or she made copious notes for future work. I think she was about the most ambitious girl in New York at that time—too ambitious, some said; her praises were being sung—too much sung was a common rumour; her picture—how lovely she was, and is!—was published repeatedly—too repeatedly, dear enemies whispered; and everyone was waiting to see just how long it would take her to make good.”

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It took some time. Not until the year in which she was 29 did she land anywhere “to speak of,” though for ten years previous to that acceptance, by Success Magazine, she had constantly submitted stories. That was in 1903. Then, in 1911, the Delineator held a short story contest in which over 15,000 stories were received. Miss Gale took first prize with a tale called “The American Dawn.” It was $2,000 and in addition her other two entries (each person was allowed to submit three stories) were deemed good enough to be purchased. But meanwhile she had written stories about Pelleas and Ettare, two old lovers, and stories about Friendship Village—some forty of the first and, ultimately, about sixty of the second—and the process of collecting her Friendship Village fiction into books had begun. Said Miss Gale, in 1919: “The first editor to whom these Friendship Village stories were submitted declined them with the word that his acquaintance with small towns was wide but that he had never seen any such people as these.... I am still not sure that he was not right.”

She was the author of ten published books before she produced anything constituting a lien upon general attention. But then, with an effect of extreme suddenness to the world outside of Portage, there came from her pen the 402-page novel, Birth. Its length is a point of interest in view of the brevity of Miss Lulu Bett and Faint Perfume, both of which are so decidedly under the average novel in length. And yet Birth exhibits the same conciseness of phrase, the same avoidance of unnecessary words so noticeable in the two later books. It is the story of a poor little man, Marshall Pitt, who comes to an insignificant Western town as a pickle salesman and remains there as a paperhanger, a husband and a father. The book’s comments on life have been aptly described as “piercing”—it is a fine needlework of satire—but there are lovely lyrical moments and the tragic action is touched with majesty. Altogether a great novel. Miss Gale considers it the finest thing she has done and for once her judgment of her own work, generally as untrustworthy as most authors’ or slightly more so, is right.