Gale, Zona (1874-1938) American fiction writer and playwright. Born in Portage, WI, Zona Gale earned a BA (1895) and MA (1899) in literature from the University of Wisconsin. She worked as an editor and writer for newspapers in Wisconsin and New York City until resigning to pursue a literary career. Her first novel, Romance Island, appeared in 1906, and she became a prolific writer of short stories and novels, often set in small Midwestern towns. Under pressure from her mother, she left New York City and returned to Portage in 1909, although she made extended visits to New York City. Throughout her career, she support progressive causes, including feminism and pacifism. She adapted her best-known novel Miss Lulu Bett (1920), featuring the feminist revolt of its small-town heroine, for the stage; it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 1922. It is not clear when Gale and Cather met. Gale sent a letter introducing Margery Lattimer in 1925, but the bulk of their correspondence begins in 1928, when Cather wrote that she was “haunted by Portage” (#0949), likely after reading Gale’s Portage, Wisconsin and Other Essays (Knopf 1928). Cather also wrote of her admiration of Gale’s Borgia (Knopf 1929), and Gale invited Cather to visit Portage to write. Most of their correspondence testifies, however, to their failure to see each other when Gale visited New York City. Gale began an autobiography but died suddenly of pneumonia before completing it.

Cather, John (1892-1959) (“Jack”). Cather’s brother. Born and raised in Red Cloud, NE, Jack was the seventh child and fourth son of Charles and Virginia Cather. He was nearly two decades younger than Willa Cather, and she was a doting older sister when he was a small boy. Because she missed him after her 1896 move to Pittsburgh, PA, she wrote several poems about him and the story “Jack-a-Boy” (1901). After graduating from Red Cloud High School in 1912, Jack studied for two years at University of Nebraska in Lincoln. With Willa Cather’s encouragement, in 1914 he enrolled at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh to study engineering. Willa Cather was then living in New York City but traveled to Pittsburgh to help him settle in and enjoyed visiting him and supported his decision to change his major to theater. It is not clear whether he graduated from Carnegie Tech but the British government trained him as a chemist so he could inspect munitions factories. While working in Smethport, PA, he met Irma Wells, and they married in 1918. They had two children, Catherine and Ella Faye. After World War I, he worked as a chemical engineer in the oil industry in Cincinnati, OH, Casper, WY, and Bradford, PA. In 1936 he moved to Whittier, CA, and became a business partner with his brothers Douglass and James in an oil production company. He died in Long Beach, CA. Willa Cather mentions him frequently in letters, but she seems to have had little contact with him and his family in later years, and no letters from her to him have surfaced.