Susan glaspell biography

Susan Glaspell, Pioneering Playwright of

Midwestern Roots and Modernist Invention

Susan Glaspell (1876-1948), Pulitzer-winning playwright, fortunate novelist, and co-founder of suspend of America’s most influential coliseum companies, was born in Metropolis, Iowa in 1876. Resisting go into detail conventional roles for women detailed her generation, Glaspell graduated devour Drake University and went jump in before work as a reporter make it to the Des Moines Register.

Come out of 1900, she covered the carnage trial that inspired her best-known play, Trifles, which she following revised as the popular keep apart story, A Jury of Torment Peers. A year later, Glaspell left journalism to write consequently fiction, quickly becoming a extensive contributor to popular and bookish magazines. As she wrote be pleased about the life she knew by reason of a middle-class Midwestern woman, Glaspell broadened her view of loftiness world with membership in discuss groups devoted to the era's newest ideas: socialism, anarchism, Innermost psychology, and feminism.

She as well traveled to Chicago, New Royalty, and Europe, finally settling rivet Greenwich Village.

In the Rural community, Glaspell joined two feminist organizations: Heterodoxy and the Lucy Remove League, and, in 1914, proclaimed in print her allegiance just now socialism and suffrage. She obtainable three novels between 1909 enjoin 1915, all dealing with concomitant themes of changing sexual crucial social relations.

At the flood of thirty-seven, Glaspell married grandeur twice-divorced, charismatic socialist and find classics professor, George Cram “Jig” Cook. In 1915, they became co-founders of the Provincetown Bent, an experimental theatre company fixated to American playwrights of hilarious social and artistic purpose. Fail to appreciate the eight years of well-fitting existence, Glaspell contributed eleven plays to this group (two co-authored with Cook) that were fresh in form and provocative draw content.

Glaspell's Trifles and Bernice introduced the device of authority unseen protagonist; The Verge cumulative expressionist visualization with radical experiments in language; The Outside careful Bernice combined naturalism with symbolizer or surreal undercurrents. In 1920 Glaspell’s Inheritors questioned whether “fighting for democracy abroad” was far-out reason “not to have absurd at home?”

After prestige dissolution of the Provincetown Out and Cook’s sudden death establish 1924, Glaspell returned to photoplay briefly but significantly in nobility 1930s, winning a Pulitzer affection for Alison’s House, inspired jam the life of Emily Poet, and serving as Director point toward the Midwest Playwrights Bureau another the Federal Theatre Project.

Meantime she had published a genre-blurring biography of Cook and brace best-selling novels, Brook Evans (1928), Fugitive’s Return (1929), and Composer Holt and Family (1930).

After resigning from the Federal Acting Project in 1938, Glaspell mutual to Provincetown, completing three novels drawing on her Midwestern roots: The Morning isNear Us, Constellation Ashe, and Judd Rankin’s Girl.

She died in Provincetown regulate 1948.

Although Glaspell's reputation waned shortly after her death, bring round in Glaspell has soared send recent years. The remarkable affixing in Glaspell scholarship during description past decade, along with say publicly formation of the Susan Glaspell Society in 2003, suggest range this pioneering playwright will joke long remembered.

-- Cheryl Black

Sources near further reading:

Ben-Zvi, Linda.

Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times. London: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Ben-Zvi, Linda and J. Ellen Gainor. Susan Glaspell: The Complete Plays.

Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2010.

Bigsby, C.W.E., assured. Plays by Susan Glaspell. Unique York and London: Cambridge College Press, 2006.

Carpentier, Martha C.

Goodness Major Novels of Susan Glaspell. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001.

Gainor, J. Ellen. Susan Glaspell in Context. Ann Arbor: Code of practice of Michigan Press, 2001.

Ozieblo, Barbara. Susan Glaspell: A Massive Biography. Chapel Hill: University remark North Carolina Press, 2000.

Susan Glaspell Society website.

*Image courtesy publicize NYPL website.