Susan Glaspell was born on July
1, 1876, in Davenport, Iowa, the daughter of Elmer
and Alice Keating Glaspell. After graduation from
high school, she worked as a reporter and then
attended Drake University, where she received
a Ph.B. degree in philosophy. In Des Moines she
again did newspaper work, covering the murder
trial of an Iowa farm woman, Mrs. Hossack, who
had hatcheted her husband in their bed, an incident
that became the source of Glaspell's one-act play
Trifles and her most famous story, "A
Jury of Her Peers." By 1902 she had returned
to Davenport, where she began writing fiction.
There, in 1907, she became involved with George
Cram Cook, a freethinker and divorced scion of
a wealthy Davenport family. At the time, he was
planning a second marriage, but by 1910, after
this second union failed, he and Glaspell resumed
a close relationship that resulted in their marriage
in 1913. With Cook she became active in New York
literary life and in the experimental theater
movement in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The work
they did there with several leading playwrights
and actors resulted in the creation of the Provincetown
Players, who performed Trifles in 1916.
Along with Eugene O'Neill, Glaspell was the leading
playwright of the group. Eleven of her plays were
produced during the Players's next six years.
In 1924, Cook died while the couple
was living in Greece, and Glaspell returned to
Provincetown, where she met Norman Matson, another
playwright, with whom she lived for eight years.
Always a champion of free speech and other liberal
causes, Glaspell campaigned in 1927 in support
of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, while
continuing to write novels, plays, stories, and
a biography of Cook. Her play A Comic Artist
was produced in London and New York, and in 1930
she became the second woman to win the Pulitzer
Prize in drama for her play Alison's House.
In the thirties she gave up playwriting, although
she headed the Midwest Play Bureau of the Federal
Theatre Project for two years. Her 1939 novel
The Morning Is Near Us was the last of
her works to receive wide acclaim. In all she
produced fifty short stories, fourteen plays,
and nine novels. She died of pneumonia in Provincetown
in 1948. -L.H.M
Photograph courtesy of The Henry W. and Albert
A. Berg Collection, New York Public Library
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