Glaspell, Susan

▪ American dramatist and novelist

in full  Susan Keating Glaspell 

born July 1, 1876, Davenport, Iowa, U.S.

died July 27, 1948, Provincetown, Mass.

      American dramatist and novelist who, with her husband, George Cram Cook (Cook, George Cram), founded the influential Provincetown Players in 1915.

      Glaspell graduated in 1899 from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. In college she had published a few short stories in the Youth's Companion and had worked as college correspondent for a local newspaper, and on graduating she became a reporter for the Des Moines Daily News. In 1901 she returned to her native Davenport to devote herself to writing; her stories, mainly local-colour (local colour) pieces set in Freeport (Davenport), were soon appearing regularly in such magazines as the Ladies' Home Journal, the American, and Harper's.

      In 1909 Glaspell published her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered, a romance of little distinction that nonetheless enjoyed some success. After a year in Paris she produced a second novel, The Visioning (1911). In 1912 a collection of previously published stories appeared under the title Lifted Masks. The following year she married Cook, a longtime friend and the literary and radical son of a wealthy Davenport family. They quickly became central figures in the life of Greenwich Village in New York City. In 1915 she published Fidelity, a novel, and together with her husband Suppressed Desires, a satirical one-act play on popular Freudianism. These works show a wide stylistic range, from psychological realism to Symbolism and Expressionism.

      In 1915, at their summer home in Provincetown on Cape Cod, the couple organized a group of local artists as an amateur theatre group and staged a number of one-act plays in a converted fish warehouse. The next year Eugene O'Neill was introduced to the group, which soon became more formally organized as the Provincetown Players. They began presenting a winter season of performances at the Playwright's Theatre in Greenwich Village. Glaspell wrote several one-act plays for the group, notably Trifles (1916), Close the Book (1917), A Woman's Hour (1918), and Tickless Time (1919), and four full-length plays, including Bernice (1919), Inheritors (1921), and The Verge (1921).

      In 1922 Glaspell and Cook established themselves at Delphi, Greece, where he died two years later. Glaspell returned to New York and in 1927 published a biography of her husband entitled The Road to the Temple. Subsequently she published The Comic Artist (1927), a play on which she collaborated with Norman H. Matson (to whom she was married for a time), and Alison's House (1930), a play that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Her later novels included The Fugitive's Return (1929) and The Morning Is Near Us (1939).

Additional Reading

Mary E. Papke, Susan Glaspell: A Research and Production Sourcebook (1993); Veronica Makowsky, Susan Glaspell's Century of American Women: A Critical Interpretation of Her Work (1993); Linda Ben-Zvi (ed.), Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction (1995); and Linda Ben-Zvi, Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times (2005).

* * *