Susan Glaspell

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Glaspell, Susan (1882–1948), with her husband, George Cram Cook, was a founder and leader of the Provincetown Players and The Playwrights' Theatre, for which, sometimes in collaboration with him, she wrote such one‐act plays as Suppressed Desires (1914), satirizing psychoanalysis; Trifles (1916), dealing with the death of a man and the arrest of his wife on suspicion of murder; Close the Book (1917); A Woman's Honor (1918); and Tickless Time (1918), satirizing romantic escapists from modern civilization. Her longer plays include Bernice (1919), which reveals the character of a dead woman through her effect upon her family and friends; The Inheritors (1921), concerned with a Midwestern college founded by liberal families whose third generations clash because one remains liberal but the other has become conservative; The Verge (1921), a psychological study of a neurotic woman driven to insanity; and Alison's House (1930, Pulitzer Prize), dealing with the effect of a poet's life on her surviving family, and supposedly suggested by the life of Emily Dickinson. Her other works include Lifted Masks (1912), a book of short stories; The Road to the Temple (1926), a romantic biography of her husband; and novels which include The Glory of the Conquered (1909), the story of a scientist who goes blind and dies just as he is about to make a great discovery; The Visioning (1911), set at an army post; Fidelity (1915), about a girl who elopes with a married man; Brook Evans (1928), describing the lives of a mother and daughter; The Fugitive's Return (1929), dealing with an Iowa girl and her experiences on Cape Cod and in Greece; Ambrose Holt and Family (1931); The Morning Is Near Us (1940), about the homecoming of an American woman traveler; Norma Ashe (1942), tracing the careers of a group of college students through 30 years; and Judd Rankin's Daughter (1945), about an American “grass roots” philosopher and his family.

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.

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).