Zona Gale

It was in October that Mary Chavah burned over the grass of her lawn, and the flame ran free across the place where in Spring her wild flower bed was made. Two weeks later she had there a great patch of purple violets. And all Old Trail Town, which takes account of its neighbours' flowers, of the migratory birds, of eclipses, and the like, came to see the wonder. "Mary Chavah " said most of the village, "you're the luckiest woman alive. If a miracle was bound to happen, it'd get itself happened to you." "I don't believe in miracles, though," Mary wrote to Jenny Wing. "These come just natural-only we don't know how." "That is miracles," Jenny wrote back. "They do come natural-we don't know how.

The central message of Christmas story is: If we didn't already have Christmas, we'd find a way to invent it. It's hard times in Old Trail Town as the Season of Giving approaches. The factory that employs most of the town is closed and not likely to re-open, and town merchants fear that people will try to shop on credit. Unwilling to carry the debt, the merchants work out a scheme to get everybody in town to agree not to have Christmas that year. What happens next proves that Christmas can't be banned from the hearts of those who truly believe in it.

Before it was a Pulitzer Prize-winning play and a successful silent film, Zona Gale's Miss Lulu Bett was the best-selling novel of 1920. A departure from Gale's earlier idyllic Friendship Village stories, Miss Lulu Bett is the story of a small-town Midwestern spinster who gets a chance at both marriage and feminist awakening--an example of the Midwestern "revolt from the village" movement. This edition brings together, for the first time, the original novel and the play (including both endings).

It is as if Friendship Village were to say: - "There is no help for it. A telephone line, antique oak chairs, kitchen cabinets, a new doctor, and the like are upon us. But we shall be medi val directly-we and our improvements. Really, we are so now, if you know how to look."