Books: Wisconsin Zephyr

PAPA LA FLEUR—Zona Gale—Appleton ($1.50).

Belying her name, Zona Gale’s literary position is not in stormy latitudes but among calm inland waters. Wiser than her generation, she has taken not the whole U. S. to be her province but only her own small town of Portage, Wis. There, like Candide, she cultivates her literary garden, is content with small, home-grown blooms. Older and gentler than when she wrote Miss Lulu Bett, she still likes to tell a long story briefly, intensively, in quiet words.

Papa La Fleur, an old man, descendant of French voyageurs, lived peacefully with his two daughters, made a living by keeping bees on an island in the river. Dolly, his eldest daughter, still a fine figure of a woman, had come home from a year in Chicago changed, embittered. But she never told anyone what had happened. Linnie, the younger, just grown up, loved her home but wanted to get away. Milo, a neighbor who raised orchids and was not otherwise exciting, kept trying to get her to marry him, but she was not enthusiastic. When rumors came that a power company wanted to plant one of their towers on the island, Papa La Fleur and Linnie, pleasantly thrilled, went hotfoot to find the power man. They brought him back to dinner; it was a delightful evening; the deal was arranged. When he left, Linnie guided him back to the hotel. Next morning Linnie was still gone. Papa La Fleur, Milo and all of them were beside themselves except Dolly, who sniffed and snapped at their suspicions, said Linnie would make out all right. When Papa La Fleur took to his bed Milo wired Linnie in Chicago, in care of the power man. That brought her back. But when her father implored her to tell him what she had been up to, like Dolly she refused. Hurt to the quick, realizing at last that even a man with two daughters may be alone in the world, old Papa La Fleur stumbled off to his canoe, paddled out into the river in dangerously high water. Hours later they found the overturned canoe, his floating cap. And it turned out that Linnie, like Dolly, had had nothing to conceal. Remorsefully she told Milo she would marry him.

The Author is a good deal older (58) than her public is apt to think her. Born in Portage, Wis., she left home, like other small-town girls, to go to college (University of Wisconsin), to get a job (newspaper work) in the big city (Milwaukee, then Manhattan). In Manhattan, as a “fragile, flowerlike, feminine” reporter on the late great World, she filled every tough assignment given her, found time for a daily letter to her mother, for her own writing on the side. After three years of it she went back to Portage in 1904, settled down to write. When she married, about five years ago, she took a Portage man, William Llywelyn Breese, banker-manufacturer. The U. S. is conscious of her chiefly as authoress of some twenty-odd books, of which Miss Lulu Bett is most famed (her dramatization of it won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize). Wisconsin knows her as a liberal in education (onetime regent of its University, her alma mater), as a progressive in politics (she took the stump in 1924 for the last “Fighting Bob” La Follette), as a humanitarian writer with many a past and present protege (David Gordian, Anzia Yezierska, the late Margery Latimer Toomer et al.). Other books: Birth, Friendship Village, Bridal Pond, Portage, Wisconsin, and Other Essays.