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Drama
Susan Glaspell
Susan Glaspell was born on July 1, 1876 in Davenport,
Iowa, to a middle-class family. After completing high school, she worked
for a time as reporter for a local newspaper and as an editor for a magazine.
She then entered and was graduated from Drake University in Des Moines in
1899, remaining in Iowa after graduation to write for the Des Moines Daily
News. In December 1900, she covered a famous criminal case in which a
woman, Margaret Hossack, was accused of murdering her husband with an ax as
he slept and filed numerous stories on this sensational story. This case
provided the topic for her play Trifles (1916) and her short story,
"Jury of Her Peers" (1917).
Not long after the case was tried in the spring
of 1901, Glaspell returned to Davenport briefly before moving to Chicago in
1902 to enroll in graduate school, returning home to Davenport in 1904 to
write. There, in 1908 she met her future husband, theatre director and producer
George Cram "Jig" Cook, who was then teaching at the University of Iowa.
After several interruptions in their relationship, including his marriage
to and divorce from another woman, the couple was married in 1913. Glaspell,
having successfully published her fiction, spent a year in Paris before the
marriage, and the couple settled on Cape Cod.
There, with Mary Heaton Vorse, they founded one
of America's most influential "Little Theatres," the Provincetown Players,
for which Glaspell, Eugene O'Neill, and such other American modernists as
Djuna Barnes would write plays. The Provincetown Players would move to New
York in 1920 to become America's pre-eminent theatre company of the decade,
although Glaspell quit the group in 1925 after her husband's death and O'Neill's
assumption of the artistic direction of the company.
Glaspell continued to write both drama and fiction,
winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1930 for her last play Alison's
House, based on the life of American poet Emily Dickinson. She died in
1948.
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Selected Bibliography of Glaspell's Work
One-Act Plays
Suppressed Desires (1915)
Trifles (1916)
The People (1917)
Close the Book (1917)
The Outside (1917)
Woman's Honor (1918)
Tickless Time (1919)
Plays
Bernice (1919)
The Verge (1921)
Inheritors (1921)
Alison's House (1930)
Bigsby, C.W.E., ed. Plays by Susan Glaspell. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.
Selected Prose
The Glory of the Conquered (novel, 1909)
The Visioning (novel, 1911)
Lifted Masks (short stories, 1912)
Fidelity (novel, 1915)
The Road to the Temple (memoir, 1925)
Brook Evans (novel, 1928)
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Further reading About Glaspell's Work
Ben-Zvi, Linda, ed. Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.
Ben-Zvi, Linda. "Susan Glaspell's Contributions to Contemporary Women Playwrights." Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights. Ed. Enoch Brater. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 147-66.
Chinoy, Helen Crinch, and Linda Walsh Jenkins. Women in American Theatre. Rev. Ed. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1987.
Dymkowski, Christine. "On the Edge: The Plays of Susan Glaspell." Modern Drama 31 (March 1988): 91-105.
Friedman, Sharon. "Feminism as Theme in Twentieth-Century American Women's Drama." American Studies 25 (1984): 69-89.
Gainor, J. Ellen. Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915-48. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001.
Makowsky, Veronica. Susan Glaspell's Century of American Women: A Critical Interpretation of Her Work. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.
Noe, Marcia. Susan Glaspell: Voice from the Heartland. Macomb, IL: Western Illinois UP, 1983.
Oziebolo, Barbara. "Rebellion and Rejection: The Plays of Susan Glaspell." Modern American Drama: The Female Canon. Ed. June Schlueter. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1990.
Papke, Mary E. Susan Glaspell: A Research and Production Sourcebook. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.
Sarlos, Robert. Jig Cook and the Provincetown Players: Theatre in Ferment. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1982.
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