Susan Glaspell

Susan Glaspell
Susan Glaspell, circa 1915
Born	(1876-07-01)July 1, 1876 Davenport, Iowa, USA
Died	July 27, 1948(1948-07-27) (aged 72) Provincetown, Massachusetts, USA
Education	Davenport High School Drake University University of Chicago
Spouse	Norman Matson (1925-1932) George Cram Cook (1913-1924†)
Information
Debut works	The Glory of the Conquered (1909) Suppressed Desires (1915)
Notable work(s)	Alison's House; Trifles ("A Jury of Her Peers"); Fidelity; The Verge; Inheritors
Works with	George Cram Cook
Awards	Pulitzer Prize for Drama (1931)

Susan Keating Glaspell (July 1, 1876 – July 27, 1948) was an American Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actress, director, novelist, biographer, poet, and journalist. With her husband George Cram Cook, she founded the Provincetown Players, one of the first modern American theater companies. During the Great Depression she served in the Works Progress Administration as Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project.

A best-selling author in her own time, Glaspell's novels fell out of print after her death, during which time she was remembered primarily for discovering Eugene O'Neil, and for Trifles (1916), a one-act play frequently cited as one of the greatest works of American theater. Critical reassessment has led to renewed interest in her career, and she is today recognized as a pioneering feminist and America's first important modern female playwright.

A prolific writer, Glaspell is known to have published over fifty short stories, nine novels, and fourteen plays. Often set in her native Iowa, these semi-autobiographical tales frequently address contemporary issues, such as gender, ethics, and dissent, while featuring deep, sympathetic characters who make principled stands.

Biography

Early life and career

Glaspell, circa 1883.

Susan Glaspell was born in 1876 to Elmer Glaspell, a farmer, and Alice Keating, a teacher. She was raised on a rural homestead just below the bluffs of the Mississippi River along the western edge of Davenport, Iowa, on property bought from the US Government by her great-grandfather following the Black Hawk Purchase. Having a fairly conservative upbringing, "Susie" was named for her grandmother, Susan Ricker, and was remembered as a "precocious" child who would often rescue stray animals. With the family farm increasingly threatened by urban development, Glaspell's worldview was shaped by the pioneer tales of her grandmother, who told of regular visits by Indians to the farm in the years before Iowa statehood. Growing up directly across the river from his ancestral village, Glaspell was also influenced by the autobiography of Black Hawk, whose belief that Americans should be worthy inheritors of the land informed all of her writing. During the Panic of 1893, the farm was sold and Glaspell moved with her family into the city. Raised to value hard work, this event had a profound impact on her social views.

Glaspell's 1894 graduation photo.

An advanced student in Davenport's public schools, Glaspell was one of six to give a commencement speech at her 1894 graduation. By age eighteen she was earning a regular salary as a journalist for a local newspaper, and by twenty she authored a weekly column satirizing Davenport's upper class. At twenty-one Glaspell enrolled at Drake University, against the prevailing attitude that college makes women unattractive. A philosophy major, she entered as a junior, skipping the first two years of study. Here she excelled in male-dominated debate tournaments, winning the right to represent Drake at the state debates her senior year. A Des Moines Daily News' article on her graduation ceremony cited Glaspell as "a leader in the social and intellectual life of the university." The day after graduation, Glaspell began working full-time for the paper as a reporter, a rare position for a woman, particularly that she was assigned to cover the state legislature and murder cases.

Glaspell's 1896 Davenport city directory listing.

After covering the conviction of a woman accused of killing her abusive husband, Glaspell abruptly resigned at age twenty-four and moved back to Davenport to focus on writing fiction. Unlike most new writers, her stories were eagerly published by the leading periodicals, including Harper's, The Ladies' Home Journal, and Woman's Home Companion. A large cash prize from an influential short story magazine financed her transition to Chicago, where she composed her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered, published in 1909. A best-seller, the New York Times declared the book "brings forward a new author of fine and notable gifts." With the earnings she took a year-long tour of Europe, immersing herself in art and culture. Already an experimental artist, the trip permanently influenced her writing style. Glaspell's second novel, The Visioning, was published in 1911. New York Times said of the book, "it does prove Miss Glaspell's staying power, her possession of abilities that put her high among the ranks of American storytellers." Her third novel, Fidelity, was published in 1915. Today considered her best novel,New York Times called it "a big and real contribution to American novels."

Theatre

Glaspell at her 12th street home in Davenport, circa 1913.

In Davenport Glaspell met George Cram Cook, a classics professor, novelist, poet, and itinerant farmer. Though he was already in his second, troubled marriage, she fell in love with him, and they wed in 1913. To escape Davenport's disapproving gossip, Glaspell and Cook moved to New York City's Greenwich Village. Here, Glaspell became a charter member of Heterodoxy, an early feminist debating group composed of the leading women's rights crusaders. She also became associated with many of the era's social reformers and activists, including Upton Sinclair and Emma Goldman. Glaspell and Cook rented a summer home in Provincetown, Cape Cod. After a series of miscarriages, Glaspell underwent surgery to remove a fibroid tumor pressed against her uterus. Still weak from the operation, she and Cook founded a nonprofit theater company, the Provincetown Players, in an abandoned fisherman wharf across the road from their cottage. Devoted to creating artistic plays reflecting contemporary American issues, the project was intended as a rejection of the escapist melodramas produced on Broadway.

Despite the earlier successes of her short stories and novels, Glaspell would be most remembered for the twelve groundbreaking plays she submitted to the company over the next seven years. Her first play, Trifles (1916), was based on the murder trial she covered as a young reporter in Des Moines prior to her resignation. Today considered an early feminist masterpiece, it was an immediate success, riveting audiences with its daring views of justice and morality. It has since become one of the most anthologized works in American theater history. In 1921 she completed Inheritors. Following three generations of a pioneer family, it is perhaps America's first modern historical drama. This same year she also finished The Verge, one of the earliest American works of expressionist art.

Believing an amateur staff would lead to increased innovation, the Provincetown playwrights often participated directly in the production of their own plays. Though untrained, Glaspell would receive further acclaim as an actress. William Zorach, an early member of the group, reported "she had only to be on the stage and the play and the audience came alive." Legendary theater director Jacques Copeau, visiting from France, was moved to tears by a Glaspell performance:

Recently I attended a performance of one of your little theaters and I observed on the stage a young woman of modest appearance, with a sensitive face, a tender and veiled voice. She was absolutely lacking in technique. She did not have the slightest notion of it. For example, she did not know how to walk on stage, nor how to enter or exit. She did not know either how to accompany her words with the gestures appropriate to the action of the dialogue, and she kept constantly her two arms a little feverishly against her body. And only at the end of her speech, she reached out her two arms simply, and she became suddenly silent, looking out straight ahead as if she was continuing to live her thoughts in the silence. Well, that gesture was admirable, and there was in that look a human emotion that brought tears to my eyes. I had a real woman before me, and the tears which she made me shed were not those involuntary tears brought on sometimes by the nervous excitement of the theater. They were real tears, natural tears, human as she was.

The original Provincetown Theater

Once established, the theater was moved from Cape Cod to New York City. While considering new plays to produce, Glaspell discovered Eugene O'Neil, who would come to be cited as the greatest playwright in American history. Other notables associated with the group include Edna St. Vincent Millay, Theodore Dreiser, and Glaspell's longtime friend Floyd Dell. As the company became more successful, playwrights began to view it as a launchpad to other, more commercial theater venues, a violation of the group's original purpose. Cook and Glaspell decided to leave the company they founded, which had become 'too successful'. Glaspell was by now at the height of her theater career, with her last written play, The Verge, bringing the most praise. In 1922 Glaspell and Cook moved to Delphi, Greece. Cook died there in 1924 of glanders.

From the onset, Glaspell's plays were also published in print form, receiving laudatory reviews by New York's most prestigious newspapers and magazines. By 1918 Glaspell was already considered one of America's most significant new playwrights. In 1920 her plays began to be printed in England by the highly reputable British publisher, Small & Maynard. Here, she would be better received than in America. Hailed as a genius, English critics ranked her above O'Neil, and alongside the most important playwright since Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen. To satisfy demand for Glaspell's writing, a British version of her novel Fidelity was published, going through five editions in five weeks. By the time Inheritors was produced for England in 1925, every leading newspaper and literary magazine published an extensive review, most unanimous in their praise. One enthusiastic reviewer claimed, "this play will live when Liverpool is a rubbish heap."

Poster for the 1938 WPA production of Alison's House, for which Glaspell won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Late career

Glaspell returned to Cape Cod, where she wrote a biography of her late husband called The Road to the Temple (1927). During the late twenties she was romantically involved with the younger writer Norman H. Matson. In this period she wrote three novels: the bestselling Brook Evans (1928), Fugitive's Return (1929) and Ambrose Holt and Family (1931). She also wrote the play, Alison's House, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 1932 Glaspell's relationship with Matson ended after eight years, and she fell into her first and only period of low productivity as she struggled with alcoholism and poor health.

In 1936 Glaspell moved to Chicago after being appointed Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project. Over the next few years she reconnected with siblings and regained control of her drinking and creativity. When her work for the Federal Theater Project was finished, Glaspell returned to Cape Cod. The time she spent back in the Midwest influenced her work, and her last three novels increasingly focused on the region, on family life, and on theistic questions. They included The Morning is Near Us (1939), Norma Ashe (1942), and Judd Rankin's Daughter (1945).

Susan Glaspell died in Provincetown on July 28, 1948, of viral pneumonia.

Legacy

Glaspell at her Provincetown residence, 1940.

Glaspell was highly regarded in her own time, and was well known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. According to her New York Times obituary, she was also "one of the nation's most widely-read novelists." However, Glaspell's feminist idealism did not thrive in the post-war era of female domesticity, and her novels fell out of print after her death. Furthermore, in 1940 a new generation of influential Broadway-based critics began publishing derogatory reviews of her plays, having a sizable effect on her long-term standing. Exacerbating the issue was Glaspell's tendency to avoid publicity and downplay her own accomplishments, perhaps a result of her modest Midwestern upbringing. Accordingly, in the United States her work was seriously neglected for many years. Internationally, she received some attention by scholars who were primarily interested in her more experimental work from the Provincetown years.

In the late 1970's critics began to reevaluate Glaspell's career, and interest in her work has grown steadily ever since. Today, Glaspell scholarship is a "burgeoning" field, with several book-length biographies and analyses of her work being published by university presses in recent years. She is often cited as a "prime example" of an overlooked female writer deserving canonization. Perhaps the originator of modern American theater, she has been called "the First Lady of American Drama." In 2003 the International Susan Glaspell Society was founded, with the aim of promoting "the recognition of Susan Glaspell as a major American dramatist and fiction writer." Her plays are frequently performed by college and university theater departments, but she has become more widely known for her often-anthologized works: the one-act play Trifles, and its short-story adaptation, A Jury of Her Peers. These two items have, in the last twenty years, become staples of Women's Studies curricula across the United States and the world.

Sign on Glaspell's former Cape Cod home.

Revival

New York

The Mint Theater in New York City produced Alison's House in 1999 under the direction of Linda Ames Key. The Metropolitan Playhouse staged Inheritors in 2005; the production was directed by Yvonne Opffer Conybeare. The Ontological Hysteric Incubator Arts project put on two plays Glaspell, The Verge in 2009 directed by Alice Reagan, and Trifles in 2010 directed by Brooke O'Harra and Brendan Connelly.

England

The Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond upon Thames began a long association with the plays of Susan Glaspell in 1996, which continues to this day. In his 2008 programme note for Glaspell's Inheritors, Orange Tree director Sam Walters wrote: "In 1996... I felt we had rediscovered a really important writer. Now, whenever I talk to American students, which I do quite often, I try my 'Glaspell test'. I simply ask them if they have heard of her, and almost always none of them have. Then I mention Trifles, and some realize they have heard of that much-anthologized short play. So even in her own country she is shamefully neglected. And when I type Glaspell on my computer it always wants to change it to Gaskell."

Bibliography

Drama

• Suppressed Desires (1915) co-written with George Cram Cook.
• Trifles (1916) adapted into the short story A Jury of Her Peers (1917)
• Close the Book (1917)
• The Outside (1917)
• The People (1917)
• Woman's Honor (1918)
• Tickless Time (1918) co-written with George Cram Cook
• Bernice (1919)
• Inheritors (1921)
• The Verge (1921)
• Chains of Dew (1922)
• The Comic Artist (1927) co-written with Norman Matson
• Alison's House (1930) Pulitzer Prize for Drama

Novels

• Glaspell, Susan (1909). The Glory of the Conquered. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. OCLC 1022973. 
• Glaspell, Susan (1911). The Visioning. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. OCLC 697946. 
• Glaspell, Susan (1915). Fidelity. Boston: Small, Maynard. OCLC 3766832. 
• Glaspell, Susan (1928). Brook Evans. London: Gollancz. OCLC 250199028. 
• Glaspell, Susan (1929). Fugitive's Return. London: Gollancz. OCLC 13880673. 
• Glaspell, Susan (1931). Ambrose Holt and Family. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. OCLC 715926. 
• Glaspell, Susan (1939). The Morning Is Near Us. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company. OCLC 70374214. 
• Glaspell, Susan (1942). Norma Ashe. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co. OCLC 1011232. 
• Glaspell, Susan (1945). Judd Rankin's Daughter. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott Co. OCLC 4753145. 

Short story collections

• Glaspell, Susan (1912). Lifted Masks: Stories. London: F.A. Stokes. OCLC 50384016. 
• Glaspell, Susan (1927). A Jury of Her Peers (First ed.). London: E. Benn. OCLC 1875586. 

• Patricia L. Bryan and Martha C. Carpentier, ed. (2010). Her America: "A Jury of Her Peers" and Other Stories by Susan Glaspell. University of Iowa Press. 

Other

• Glaspell, Susan (1926). The Road to the Temple. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Co. OCLC 1370287.  A biography of George Cram Cook
• Glaspell, Susan (1926). Cherished and Shared of Old. New York: Julian Messner, Inc. OCLC 3500006.  A children's book

Further reading

• Ben-Zvi, Linda (2005). Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times. Oxford University Press. 
• Ozieblo, Barbara (2000). Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography. University of North Carolina Press. 
• Makowski, Veronica A (1993). Susan Glaspell's Century of American Women : A Critical Interpretation of her Work. Oxford University Press. 
• Carpentier, Martha C. (2001). The Major Novels of Susan Glaspell. University Press of Florida. 
• Ben-Zvi, Linda. ed. (1995). Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. 
• Gainor, J. Ellen (2001). Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics, 1915-48. University of Michigan Press. 

External links

• The International Susan Glaspell Society
• Rediscovering a Playwright Lost to Time (New York Times)
• Susan Glaspell biographical essay at Davenport Public Library
• Susan Glaspell at the Internet Broadway Database
• Works by Susan Glaspell at Project Gutenberg
• Glaspell's articles for Des Moines Daily News on the Hossack murder case
• Trifles, a one-act play by Susan Glaspell
• Alfred Hitchcock Presents: A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell
• Panel Discussion on Trifles/A Jury of Her Peers (youtube)
• A Jury of Her Peers EDSITEment study guide
• Persephone Books has republished two Glaspell novels; Fidelity, and Brook Evans
• Susan Glaspell at the Findagrave.com database
• two Glaspell portraits by Nickolas Muray; photo #1, photo #2
• Autobiography of Black Hawk