Zona Gale was born on August 26, 1874, in Portage and graduated in 1899 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Masters in Literature. She then spent six years as a journalist in Milwaukee and New York, but visits to Portage became a turning point when she discovered that the people of her hometown were a source of literary material. She traveled frequently, returning to Portage and living with her parents at 506 W. Edgewater in a home with her own study facing the Wisconsin River. Gale won fame for her Friendship Village stories from 1908 to 1919, a popular series on American small town life that subtly portrayed Portage people and places, and this success established her as a popular fiction writer. Along with Sinclair Lewis, she wrote contemporary stories that celebrated local color, customs, and ordinary people. She is perhaps best known for her novel Miss Lulu Bett in 1920, and her stage adaptation of the novel the following year was equally successful, making her the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama. In 1928 she married local industrialist William Llewelyn Breese, and the couple raised a young child, Leslyn, for whom Gale had assumed custody before the marriage, a rare act for a single woman at that time. Later in life, Gale spent less time writing and devoted herself to Progressive causes. As an active member of the Women's Suffrage Party and Women's Peace Party, she lobbied extensively for the 1921 Wisconsin Equal Rights Law and supported the work of Bob and Belle La Follette. Her political activism was an attempt to solve a problem she returned to repeatedly in her novels: women's frustration at their lack of opportunities, a topic she shared with friends Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gale continued writing and publishing until her death in December 1938.