A Study Guide For Zona Gale S Miss Lula Bett

A Study Guide for Zona Gale's "Miss Lula Bett," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Drama For Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Drama For Students for all of your research needs.

DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "Miss Lulu Bett" by Zona Gale. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.

Zona Gale (August 26, 1874 - December 27, 1938) was an American novelist, short story writer, and playwright. She became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921 Biography: Gale was born in Portage, Wisconsin, which she often used as a setting in her writing. She attended Wayland Academy in Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, and later entered the University of Wisconsin, from which she received a Bachelor of Literature degree in 1895, and four years later a master's degree. After college, Gale wrote for newspapers in Milwaukee and New York City, for six years. "A visit to Portage in 1903 proved a turning point in her literary life, as seeing the sights and sounds of town life led her to comment that her 'old world was full of new possibilities.' Gale had found the material she needed for her writing, and returned to Portage in 1904 to concentrate full time on fiction." She wrote and published there until her 1938 death, but made trips to New York. She published her first novel, Romance Island, in 1906, and began the very popular series of "Friendship Village" stories. In 1920, she published the novel Miss Lulu Bett, which depicts life in the Midwestern United States. She adapted it as a play, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1921........ Miss Lulu Bett is a 1920 novel by American writer Zona Gale, and later adapted for the stage. It was a bestseller at the time of its initial publication, but gradually fell out of favor with changing tastes and social conditions. Plot summary: The story concerns a woman, Lulu, who lives with her sister's family, essentially acting as a servant. She does not complain about her position, but is not happy. When her brother-in-law's brother, Ninian, comes to visit, there is a certain attraction between them. While joking around one evening they find themselves accidentally married, due to the laws of the state requiring little more than wedding vows to be recited while a magistrate is in the room for a marriage to count as legal. On learning this, Ninian and Lulu decide they actually like the idea of being married, and choose to stick with it. However, within a month, Lulu is back home, having discovered that Ninian was already legally married: 18 years prior he had wed a girl who left him after 2 years, and he had actually forgotten about the whole thing. Lulu considers this a reasonable story, but her brother-in-law, Dwight, insists that it would be a humiliation to the family to reveal such a thing, and insists that she tell everyone instead that Ninian grew bored with her and left her. Lulu is unable to see why this should be a less humiliating story, and begins to complain about her circumstances for the first time. She also notices that her teenage niece, Di, is unhappy, and also seems to be trying to use marriage as a way to escape her circumstance. Lulu eventually has to prevent Di from eloping, and is finally inspired to move out of her sister's home and live on her own. Two endings were written for the play, the original as seen in December 1920 (and the ending that won Gale the Pulitzer Prize from Drama; the first woman ever to do so) has Lulu starting a life on her own and undertaking adventures of her own as we hear in her final lines, "Good-by. Good-by, all of you. I'm going I don't know where-to work at I don't know what. But I'm going from choice!" The revised ending is a much less satisfying one, but is more typical and would have been a bit more commercially acceptable and far less challenging to the audiences of the day. In this ending, Ninian shows up in the nick of time just as Lulu decides to go off on her own life to work and live elsewhere. He asks her forgiveness and she agrees saying "I forgave you in Savannah, Georgia."

With its rich literary tradition, the Midwest provides a wealth of opportunities for bibliophiles to retrace the steps of their favorite writers and characters. The Booklover's Guide to the Midwest is a treasure map in book form, pointing the way to the heartland's most interesting literary sites. Walk down the actual Main Street that Sinclair Lewis described in his classic novel, or among the gravestones that inspired Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology. See Laura Ingalls Wilder's ''little House in the Big Woods'' and get lost in the very same cave that Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn explored. Visit Petoskey, Michigan, the setting of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories. Other poets and writers put readers in touch with pond life, sand dune architecture, Native Americans, and the great expanse of the prairie. Descriptions of each states' sites are arranged so that travelers can drive or walk from place to place with ease.

"American nights entertainment" by Grant M. Overton. Published by Good Press. Good Press publishes a wide range of titles that encompasses every genre. From well-known classics & literary fiction and non-fiction to forgotten−or yet undiscovered gems−of world literature, we issue the books that need to be read. Each Good Press edition has been meticulously edited and formatted to boost readability for all e-readers and devices. Our goal is to produce eBooks that are user-friendly and accessible to everyone in a high-quality digital format.

"This new and updated Guide, with over 2,700 cross-referenced entries, covers all aspects of the American theatre from its earliest history to the present. Entries include people, venues and companies scattered through the U.S., plays and musicals, and theatrical phenomena. Additionally, there are some 100 topical entries covering theatre in major U.S. cities and such disparate subjects as Asian American theatre, Chicano theatre, censorship, Filipino American theatre, one-person performances, performance art, and puppetry. Highly illustrated, the Guide is supplemented with a historical survey as introduction, a bibliography of major sources published since the first edition, and a biographical index covering over 3,200 individuals mentioned in the text."--BOOK JACKET.

One of the most often repeated anecdotes about the direction of literary studies over the past three decades concerns a graduate student who complained of reading Kate Chopin's The Awakening in three classes and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick in none. But Chopin has not always been featured in the literary curriculum. Though she achieved national success in her lifetime (1850--1904) as a writer of Louisiana "local color" fiction, after her death her work fell into obscurity until 1969, when Norwegian literary scholar Per Seyersted published The Complete Works of Kate Chopin and sparked a remarkable American literary revival. Chopin soon became a major presence in the canon, and today every college textbook surveying American literature contains a Chopin short story, her novel The Awakening, or an excerpt from it. In this unique work, twelve prominent Chopin scholars reflect on their parts in the Kate Chopin revival and its impact on their careers. A generation ago, against powerful odds, many of them staked their reputations on the belief -- now fully validated -- that Chopin is one of America's essential writers. These scholars energetically sponsored Chopin's works in the 1970s and 1980s and encouraged reading, studying, and teaching Chopin. They wrote books and articles about her, gave talks about her, offered interviews to newspapers and magazines, taught her works in their classes, and urged their colleagues to do the same, helping to build a network of teachers, students, editors, journalists, librarians, and others who continue to promote Chopin's work. Throughout, these essays stress several elements vital to the revival's success. Timing proved critical, as the rise of the women's movement and the emergence of new sexual norms in the 1960s helped set an ideal context for Chopin in the United States and abroad in the 1970s and 1980s. Seyersted's biography of Chopin and his accurate texts of her entire oeuvre allowed scholars to quickly publish their analyses of her work. Popular media -- including Redbook, New York Times, and PBS -- took notice of Chopin and advanced her work outside the scholarly realm. But in the final analysis, as the contributors point out, Kate Chopin's irresistible writing itself made her revival possible. Highly personal, at times amusing, and always thought provoking, these revealing recollections and new critical insights offer a fascinating firsthand account of a decisive moment in American literary history.