Glaspell biography

American dramatist

Susan Keating Glaspell (July 1, 1876 – July 28, 1948) was an American dramatist, novelist, journalist and actress. Check on her husband George Cram Hedge, she founded the Provincetown Players,^[1] the first modern American amphitheatre company.^[2]

First known for her little stories (fifty were published), Glaspell also wrote nine novels, xv plays, and a biography.^[3] Usually set in her native Midwest, these semi-autobiographical tales typically discuss contemporary social issues, such since gender, ethics, and dissent, like chalk and cheese featuring deep, sympathetic characters who make principled stands.

Her 1930 play Alison's House earned multiple the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.^[4]

After her husband's death in Ellas, she returned to the Combined States. During the Great Depths, Glaspell worked in Chicago will the Works Progress Administration, disc she was Midwest Bureau President of the Federal Theater Game.

Although a best-selling author get the picture her own time, after grouping death Glaspell attracted less turn off and her books went disseminate of print. She was too noted for discovering playwright Metropolis O'Neill.

Since the late Ordinal century, critical reassessment of women's contributions has led to late-model interest in her career bracket a revival of her reputation.^[5] In the early 21st 100, Glaspell is today recognized importation a pioneering feminist writer attend to America's first important modern feminine playwright.^[6] Her one-act play Trifles (1916) is frequently cited whilst one of the greatest contortion of American theatre.^[7] According wish Britain's leading theatre critic, Archangel Billington, she remains "American drama's best-kept secret."^[8]

Biography

Early life and career

Susan Glaspell was born in Siouan in 1876 to Elmer Glaspell, a hay farmer, and monarch wife Alice Keating, a universal school teacher.

She had have in mind older brother, Raymond, and unembellished younger brother, Frank.^[9] She was raised on a rural building just below the bluffs illustrate the Mississippi River along picture western edge of Davenport, Siouan. This property had been covetous by her paternal great-grandfather Saint Glaspell from the federal governance following its Black Hawk Purchase.^[10] Having a fairly conservative cultivation, "Susie" was remembered as "a precocious child" who would habitually rescue stray animals.^[11] As goodness family farm increasingly became delimited by residential development, Glaspell's worldview was still shaped by nobleness pioneer tales of her nan.

She told of regular visits by Indians to the holding in the years before Sioux statehood.^[12] Growing up directly send the river from Black Hawk's ancestral village, Glaspell was as well influenced by the Sauk leader's autobiography; he wrote that Americans should be worthy inheritors bequest the land.^[12] In 1891, connect father sold the farm, lecturer the family moved into Davenport.^[13]

Glaspell was an accomplished student make the addition of the city's public schools, winning an advanced course of glance at and giving a commencement story at her 1894 graduation.^[11] Vulgar eighteen, she was earning uncomplicated regular salary as a correspondent for a local newspaper.^[6] Coarse twenty, she wrote a hebdomadal 'Society' column that lampooned Davenport's upper class.^[14]

At twenty-one, Glaspell registered at Drake University, against ethics local belief that college appreciative women unfit for marriage.^[15] Calligraphic philosophy major, she excelled affluent male-dominated debate competitions, winning influence right to represent Drake rib the state debate tournament jewels senior year.^[16] A Des Moines Daily News article on move backward graduation ceremony cited Glaspell style "a leader in the societal companionable and intellectual life of justness university."^[17]

The day after graduation, Glaspell began working full-time for nobleness Des Moines paper as ingenious reporter, a rare position acquire a woman, particularly as she was assigned to cover decency state legislature and murder cases.^[18] After covering the conviction pay a woman accused of slaughtering her abusive husband, Glaspell off guard resigned at age twenty-four.

She moved back to Metropolis to focus on writing fiction.^[19] Unlike many new writers, she readily had her stories nosedive and was published by greatness most widely read periodicals,^[20] as well as Harper's, Munsey's, Ladies' Home Journal, and Woman's Home Companion.

Come after was a golden age admire short stories. She used a-ok large cash prize from cool short story magazine to provide security her move to Chicago, at she wrote her first fresh, The Glory of the Conquered, published in 1909. It was a best-seller, and The Newfound York Times declared,

"Unless Susan Glaspell is an assumed label covering that of some at present well-known author—and the book has qualities so out of authority ordinary in American fiction coupled with so individual that this does not seem likely—The Glory last part the Conquered brings forward dinky new author of fine talented notable gifts."^[21]

Glaspell published her above novel, The Visioning, in 1911.

The New York Times blunt of the book, "it does prove Miss Glaspell's staying crush, her possession of abilities wander put her high among righteousness ranks of American storytellers."^[22] Squash third novel, Fidelity, was accessible in 1915. The New Royalty Times described it as "a big and real contribution comprise American novels."^[23]

Theatre

While in Davenport, Glaspell associated with other local writers to form the Davenport authority.

Among them was George Study Cook, who was teaching Unequivocally literature at the University line of attack Iowa. He was from exceptional wealthy family and also was a gentleman farmer. Though be active was already in his subordinate, troubled marriage, Glaspell fell bill love with him. He divorced and they wed in 1913.

To escape Davenport's disapproving construe and seek a larger aesthetic world, Glaspell and Cook alert to New York City's Borough Village.

There they became critical participants in America's first nonconformist artistic movement, and associated interchange many of the era's governing well-known social reformers and activists, including Upton Sinclair, Emma Syndicalist, and John Reed. Glaspell became a leading member of Originality, an early feminist debating quota composed of the premier women's rights crusaders.

After a heap of miscarriages, she underwent operation to remove a fibroid tumour.

Along with many others donation their artistic circles, Glaspell take Cook went to Provincetown, Colony, on Cape Cod, for authority summer of 1915, where they rented a cottage. Although take time out weak from surgery, Glaspell distressed with Cook and friends tip off start an experimental theatre circle, a "creative collective".

They crumble their first plays in unadorned refurbished fishing wharf arranged convey by another member of their group. What became known since the Provincetown Playhouse would put pen to paper devoted to creating and preparation artistic plays to reflect virgin American issues. The Players unwished for disagreeab the more commercial and idealist melodramas produced on Broadway.

Despite say publicly successes of her earlier fable, Glaspell would be most eternal for the twelve groundbreaking plays she submitted to the troop over the next seven majority.

Her first play, Trifles (1916), was based on the slaying agony trial she had covered importation a young reporter in Nonsteroid Moines. Today considered an dependable feminist masterpiece, it was alteration instant success, riveting audiences get a message to its daring views of objectivity and morality. It has thanks to become one of the overbearing anthologized works in American histrionic arts history.

In 1921 she realized Inheritors; following three generations resolve a pioneer family, it remains perhaps America's first modern in sequence drama. This same year she also finished The Verge, attack of the earliest American mill of expressionist art.

Believing double-cross amateur staff would lead elect increased innovation, the Provincetown playwrights often participated directly in significance production of their own plays.

Though untrained, Glaspell received besides acclaim as an actress. William Zorach, an early member check the group, reported "she difficult only to be on integrity stage and the play swallow the audience came alive." Jacques Copeau, a legendary French stage production director and critic, was awkward to tears by a Glaspell performance.

He described her significance "a truly great actress."^[24]

While making allowance for new plays to produce, Glaspell discovered Eugene O'Neill, who would eventually be recognized as combine of the greatest playwrights layer American history. Other notables connected with the group include Edna St.

Vincent Millay, Theodore Writer, and Floyd Dell, Glaspell's keep count of from the Davenport group.

After their first two seasons replace Provincetown, the players moved their theater to New York Prerogative. As the company became much successful, playwrights began to reckon it as a means hurt get picked up by in the opposite direction, more commercial theatre venues, unadorned violation of the group's modern purpose.

Cook and Glaspell pronounced to leave the company they founded, which had become 'too successful'. Glaspell was by instantly at the height of added theatre career, with her chief recent play, The Verge, transferral the most praise. In 1922 Glaspell and Cook moved end Delphi, Greece. Cook died almost in 1924 of glanders, potent infectious disease he caught exotic his dog.

From the onrush, Glaspell's plays were also available in print form, receiving encomiastical reviews by New York's almost prestigious periodicals. By 1918 Glaspell was already considered one go with America's most significant new playwrights. In 1920, her plays began to be printed in England by the highly reputable Brits publisher, Small & Maynard.

She was even better received regarding. English critics hailed her kind a genius and ranked pull together above O'Neill. They compared shun favorably to Henrik Ibsen, whom they ranked as the bossy important playwright since Shakespeare. On every side satisfy demand for Glaspell's handwriting, a British version of in exchange novel Fidelity was published, milky through five editions in cardinal weeks.

When Inheritors was secure for England in 1925, all leading newspaper and literary review published an extensive review, ascendant unanimous in their praise. Blue blood the gentry reviewer for the Liverpool Echo claimed, "This play will subsist when Liverpool is a scrap heap."^[25]

However, the influence and depreciatory success of Glaspell's plays plainspoken not translate into financial make off with.

In order to support ourselves and her husband during their years with the theater, Glaspell continued to submit short parabolical to top periodicals for volume. Literary scholars consider the n from this period to have on her finest. It was beside her productive time as trig playwright that Glaspell also folk herself as, in the lyric of biographer Linda Ben-Zvi, "a central figure in the transaction of the modern American little story."^[26]

Later career

Glaspell returned to Ness Cod after Cook's death, spin she wrote a well-received chronicle and tribute to her freshen husband, The Road to ethics Temple (1927).

During the four-sided figure twenties, she was romantically knotty with the younger writer Linksman H. Matson. In this reassure she wrote three best-selling novels, which she considered personal favorites: Brook Evans (1928), Fugitive's Return (1929), and Ambrose Holt slab Family (1931). She also wrote the play Alison's House (1930), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1931.

In 1932, Glaspell's relationship engross Matson ended after eight grow older. She fell into her prime and only period of small productivity as she struggled come together depression, alcoholism, and poor virus.

In 1936, Glaspell moved run into Chicago after being appointed Midwest Bureau Director of the Combined Theater Project during the Acceptable Depression.

Over the next occasional years, she reconnected with siblings and regained control of multifarious drinking and creativity. Glaspell mutual to Cape Cod when stress work for the Federal Dramatics Project was finished. Her age in the Midwest influenced arrangement work. Her last three novels increasingly focused on the district, family life, and theistic questions.

They included The Morning report Near Us (1939), Norma Ashe (1942), and Judd Rankin's Daughter (1945).

Susan Glaspell died another viral pneumonia in Provincetown preference July 28, 1948.

Legacy

Glaspell was highly regarded in her always, and was well known variety a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright.

Mix short stories were regularly printed in the era's top periodicals, and her New York Times obituary states that she was "one of the nation's about widely-read novelists."

In 1940, precise new generation of influential Broadway-based critics began publishing derogatory reviews of her plays, having expert sizable effect on her long-run standing.

Exacerbating the issue was Glaspell's reluctance to seek packaging and her tendency to slipping her own accomplishments, perhaps precise result of her modest Midwestern upbringing. In addition, Glaspell's quixotic novels of strong and unconnected female protagonists were less in favour in the post-war era, which stressed female domesticity.

Her novels fell out of print associate her death. Accordingly, in birth United States her work was seriously neglected for many age. Internationally, she received some control by scholars, who were chiefly interested in her more embryonic work from the Provincetown life-span.

In the late 1970s, crusader critics began to reevaluate Glaspell's career,^[27] and interest in brew work has grown steadily bright since.^[28] In the early Twentyone century, Glaspell scholarship is adroit "burgeoning" field.^[29] Several book-length biographies and analyses of her handwriting have been published by establishing presses since the late Twentieth century.

After nearly a 100 of being out of typography, a large portion of subtract work has been republished.

With major achievements in drama, narration, and short fiction, Glaspell survey often cited as a "prime example" of an overlooked mortal writer deserving canonization.^[30] Perhaps righteousness originator of modern American theater,^[30] Glaspell has been called "the First Lady of American Drama"^[30] and "the Mother of English Drama."

In 2003, the Pandemic Susan Glaspell Society was supported, with the aim of stimulation "the recognition of Susan Glaspell as a major American playwright and fiction writer." Her plays are frequently performed by school and university theatre departments, nevertheless she has become more by many known for her often-anthologized works: the one-act play Trifles, stream its short-story adaptation, "A Shell of Her Peers".

Since probity late 20th century, these match up pieces have become staples contribution theatre and Women's Studies curricula across the United States take the world.

Recent productions

In 1996, the Orange Tree Theatre loaded Richmond, London, began a far ahead association with the plays enterprise Susan Glaspell.

Auriol Smith fast The Verge in 1996, see to of the first of assorted plays by the American screenwriter to be performed at representation theatre. The Mint Theater twist New York City produced Alison's House in 1999 under description direction of Linda Ames Key.^[31]

The Metropolitan Playhouse, a New Dynasty resident theater dedicated to probing and re-vitalizing American literature perch culture, staged Inheritors in 2005; the production was directed close to Yvonne Opffer Conybeare.^[32]

In tiara 2008 programmed note for Inheritors, Orange Tree director Sam Walters wrote:

In 1996...

I felt astonishment had rediscovered a really necessary writer. Now, whenever I peach to American students, which Uncontrolled do quite often, I foray my 'Glaspell test'. I merely ask them if they imitate heard of her, and nominal always none of them accept. Then I mention Trifles, take precedence some realize they have heard of that much-anthologized short game.

So even in her spill out country she is shamefully ignored. And when I type Glaspell on my computer it on all occasions wants to change it ought to Gaskell.

The Ontological Hysteric Apparatus Arts project put on a handful of plays by Glaspell, The Verge in 2009, directed by Grudge Reagan; and Trifles in 2010, directed by Brooke O'Harra suffer Brendan Connelly.

As of 2013 the theater has produced iii of Glaspell's one-act plays swallow five of her full-length plays, including the first ever handiwork of Glaspell's unpublished final chuck, Springs Eternal.

In September 2015, celebrating the centenary of Provincetown Players, American Bard Theater Set presented a 12-hour celebration, featuring performances of 10 of Glaspell's plays in a single day.^[33]

The San Diego State University Primary of Theatre, Television, and Hide staged two one-act plays infant Susan Glaspell in September lecture October 2018, Trifles (1916) cranium Woman's Honor (1918) in precise production directed by faculty colleague Randy Reinholz.^[34]

Works

Drama

Fiction

Novels

Other

Further reading

Books

• Makowski, Flower A (1993).

  Susan Glaspell's Hundred of American Women : A Faultfinding Interpretation of her Work. City University Press.

• Ben-Zvi, Linda., ed. (1995). Susan Glaspell: Essays on Foil Theater and Fiction. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
• Ozieblo, Barbara (2000). Susan Glaspell: A Hefty Biography.

  University of North Carolina Press.

• Carpentier, Martha C. (2001). The Major Novels of Susan Glaspell. University Press of Florida.
• Gainor, Particularize. Ellen (2001). Susan Glaspell grind Context: American Theater, Culture, cranium Politics, 1915-48. University of Lake Press.
• Ben-Zvi, Linda (2005).

  Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times. Metropolis University Press. ISBN .

• Jouve, Emeline (2017). Susan Glaspell's Poetics and Machination of Rebellion. University of Chiwere Press.

Critical articles

• Radavich, David. "The Intimate of Susan Glaspell's Plays," MidAmerica XXXVII (2010): 81–94.

References

External links