Not in 1967: Zona Gale and the 1921 prize
The first Pulitzer Prize for Drama to go to a woman was awarded in 1921, not in 1967. The winner was Zona Gale, for Miss Lulu Bett. The 1967 drama prize went to Edward Albee for A Delicate Balance, so the year is notable for something else entirely.
Gale’s win came in the same year as Edith Wharton’s, which is generally cited as the first for a woman among the Pulitzer fiction winners. Two of the prizes’ early years therefore carried a quiet milestone for women writers, even if few people said so at the time.
The play
Miss Lulu Bett began as a novel, published in 1920, and Gale then adapted it for the stage. The story centres on Lulu, an unmarried woman who lives in her sister’s household in a small town and is treated more or less as an unpaid servant. Her situation changes when a visiting relative of her brother-in-law takes an interest in her and a marriage follows. The marriage then proves to be on shaky legal ground, and Lulu returns to the family house, now an object of gossip.
What makes the play a good fit for its time is its quiet critique. It does not use big events. It looks at the ordinary pressures on a woman who has little money and few choices, and it asks what she might do about them. The novel and the play are reported to end differently, but the details are best left to a reader who has both texts in hand.
The play reached Broadway in late 1920 and was well received, and a silent film version followed in the 1920s.
Zona Gale
Gale was born in 1874 and came from Portage, Wisconsin, a small town that provided much of her material. She wrote about small-town American life without much sentimentality, and her fiction often looked at the gap between what people said and how they lived.
She was also publicly active. She supported causes associated with progressive politics in Wisconsin and was connected with the movement for women’s rights, and she was a pacifist. She died in 1938. These details are well established in outline, but anyone wanting more should consult a proper biography rather than rely on a short article.
How the drama prize began
The Pulitzer Prize for Drama was first awarded in 1918. The early prize was meant to reward an original American play, preferably one dealing with American life, and the terms shifted a little over the years. The first winner was Jesse Lynch Williams, for Why Marry?, which means that a woman won the prize only a few years after it began.
Women dramatists and novelists were being recognised in several countries in these years; the Swedish writer Selma Lagerlof, for example, had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1909. The drama prize has a long list of women winners since. Among those who followed Gale:
- Susan Glaspell, who won in 1931 for Alison’s House
- Zoe Akins, who won in 1935 for The Old Maid
- Mary Chase, who won in 1945 for Harvey
Later winners include Marsha Norman, Beth Henley and Paula Vogel, among others. The point is that Gale’s win was not a one-off. Women dramatists were part of the prize’s story from early on.
What the theatre looked like in 1967
By 1967, the American theatre had changed in ways that Gale’s generation could hardly have imagined. Albee’s win with A Delicate Balance represented the established stage, with its Broadway producers and its critics. Beyond that, the Off-Off-Broadway theatre scene in New York was producing work in cafes and churches, and the rock musical Hair opened at the Public Theater in the autumn of 1967, on its way to Broadway. Those developments are covered in their own articles on this site.
Reading the title carefully
Titles like this one invite a short checklist.
- The prize is for the year of the play, but the announcement is made in the following spring, which is why dates can differ in older sources.
- “First” depends on the category. Gale was the first woman to win the drama prize, but not the first woman to win any Pulitzer, since women had already shared the biography prize in 1917.
- The 1967 date is simply wrong for this milestone.