Henry (whose brother Robert Tompkins Anderson ran an innovative school for the Deaf near Hopkinsville, Kentucky[9]) had two children from a previous marriage when he married Henrietta in 1841.
(The couple's descendants include Rear Admiral Robert M. Morris, Rear Admiral Creed Cardwell Burlingame, Kentucky soldiers from the 192nd Tank Battalion who were captured in the Bataan Death March, the singer and teacher Mary Chelf Jones, a founder of the Ragged Edge Theatre, investigative journalist and photojournalist J. Carl Ganter, and the actors Sara Rue and Chris Stack.)
[10] Zoe was born in Harrodsburg, Kentucky, where John Augustus Williams and his wife Mary, who ran Daughters College (now the Beaumont Inn), took in the impoverished Anderson family.
[15] By the late 1890s, Zoe had discovered Spencer's infidelities (the couple divorced in 1898)[16] and started writing fiction and journalism for magazines as well as a gossip column for The Wichita Eagle (under the pseudonym Nancy Yanks).
Club members, attendees and other East Side readers included writers, editors and activists such as Edith and Rex Beach, Grace Duffie Boylan, Guido Bruno, Charles E. Chapin, Kathleen Blake Coleman,[21] Winnifred Harper Cooley,[22] James D. Corrothers,[23] Maria Thompson Daviess, Benjamin De Casseres, Helen Hamilton Gardener, Eustace Hale Ball, Sadakichi Hartmann, Waldemar Kaempffert, Leita and Owen Kildare, Richard Le Gallienne, Miriam Leslie, Sophie Irene Loeb, Edwin Markham, Roy McCardell, Shaemas O'Sheel, John Milton Oskison, Patrick L. Quinlan, Ameen Rihani,[24] Nellie Revell, Sydney Rosenfeld, Helen Rowland, Ida Vera Simonton, Clinton Stagg, Sallie Toler (mother of the actor Sidney Toler), Edward Owings Towne, Gertrude Ogden Tubby, Grace Miller White[25] and Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
[26] Zoe's works were also lauded and read by the philosopher and tastemaker Elbert Hubbard and the academics David Starr Jordan, James Hardy Ropes, Edwin Robert Anderson Seligman and Benjamin Ide Wheeler.
[32] Norris's novel The Quest of Polly Locke (New York: J. S. Ogilvie, 1902), about a young American woman traveling alone in Europe seeking true love, was said to have a "brilliant, vivacious style.
"[33] Her final novel, The Way of the Wind (New York: self-published, 1911), portrayed a Kansas farmer, abandoned by his wife, who loses their son to illness and commits suicide, bequeathing valuable real estate (Wichita is built there) to a young female friend who goes insane.
Recurring characters include male and female writers and artists running out of money, lovers reuniting after quarrels and lonely older people grateful for visitors to listen to their gossip.
Her interviewees included Cynthia Alden, David M. Bressler, Phebe Hanaford, Alexander Harkavy, Lillie Devereux Blake, Charles H. Parkhurst, George C. Lorimer, George Roe Van De Water, William T. Jerome, De Lancey Nicoll, John J. Delaney, Alice Fischer,[35] Bat Masterson,[36] Gutzon Borglum,[37] Nat Goodwin,[38] Oliver Herford[39] and Mary Elizabeth Lease.
The publication was lauded as "written with great vivacity, though evidently inspired by a sincere, earnest, and sympathetic spirit.”[41] Her masthead titles for herself included office boy, bootblack, printer's devil, circulation liar and "the whole shebang."
She sometimes reported undercover, dressed as a blind street accordionist, unhoused scrubwoman, or bedraggled recent arrival from Ellis Island, to see how policemen, streetcar conductors, charity workers and passersby treated her.