Glaspell, Susan

(1882-1948)

   A native of Davenport, Iowa, Susan Glaspell was educated at Drake University and the University of Chicago. She worked as a journalist before embarking on a career writing novels and plays. She was one of the founders of the Provincetown Players along with her husband, George Cram Cook, with whom she wrote one-act plays that were performed by the company in its little wharfside theatre on Cape Cod. Glaspell's Suppressed Desires (1914; coauthored by Cook), Trifles (1916), Close the Book (1917), A Woman's Honor (1918), and Tickless Time (1918; coauthored by Cook), are diverse in topic and style, ranging from comedy to drama. Her full-length plays, including The Inheritors (1921), The Verge (1921), and Alison's House* (1930), a fictionalization of Emily Dickinson's life, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, were well-received. Like Eugene O'Neill, another dramatist whose career was forged by the Provincetown Players, Glaspell merged contemporary themes with dramatic techniques influenced by modernist European playwrights. Expressionist and symbolist elements are found in her plays, which often depict the "new woman" as a central character. In collaboration with her second husband Norman Matson, Glaspell wrote The Comic Artist, a play that met with success in Europe, but failed in its 1933 New York production. During the Great Depression, Glaspell headed the Midwest bureau of the Federal Theatre Project.*