Susan Glaspell

Susan Glaspell , 1876-1948, American author, b. Davenport, Iowa, grad. Drake Univ. She married the playwright George Cram Cook (1913) and with him organized (1915) the Provincetown Players , an avant-garde theater group in Massachusetts. She wrote several plays for the company, including the one-acts Suppressed Desires (written with her husband, 1916) and Trifles (1916). She also served as actress and producer. Her longer plays include The Inheritors (1921) and Alison's House (1930; Pulitzer Prize). In addition she wrote several novels, short stories, and a biography of Cook, The Road to the Temple (1926).

Bibliography: See biography by B. Ozieblo (2001).

Glaspell, Susan (1882–1948), American novelist and dramatist, active in the formation of the Provincetown Players. Several of her one-act plays, some written in collaboration with her husband, were produced by the company, among them Suppressed Desires (1915) and Tickless Time (1918) which respectively mocked psychoanalysis and excessive idealism. Her full-length plays include Bernice (1919), The Inheritors (1921), which compares two generations of Americans, and The Verge (also 1921), an experimental study of female stress. Her finest work for the theatre was Alison's House (1930; London, 1932), based partly on the life of the American poet Emily Dickinson. Produced by Eva Le Gallienne at the Civic Repertory Theatre in New York, this was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

Glaspell, Susan (1882–1948), playwright. Born in Davenport, Iowa, the playwright and novelist studied at Drake University and the University of Chicago. With her husband, George Cram Cook, she was a founder and director of the Provincetown Players. Alone or with Cook, she wrote several one‐act plays for the troupe, including the spoof Suppressed Desires (1914), the domestic dramas Trifles (1916) and Close the Book (1917), the feminist play A Woman's Honor (1918), and the comedy Tickless Time (1918). Glaspell's full‐length works include Bernice (1919), The Inheritors (1921), The Verge (1921), and Alison's House (1930), which won the Pulitzer Prize. With her second husband, Norman Matson, she wrote The Comic Artist, which succeeded in Europe in the late 1920s but failed when brought to America in 1933. Her plays often reflected the most advanced intellectual thinking of her time and recorded her frequently telling observations, although many of them seemed more like literary exercises than theatrically knowing and effective dramas.