The Works of Susan Glaspell

Ashley 1

Tylia Ashley

Professor Parker-Bruce

English 1102-140

6 June 2007

The Works of Susan Glaspell

On July 1, 1876, in Davenport, Iowa Susan Glaspell was born. She Drake University where she earned a Bachelors degree in 1899 and worked on the staff of the Des Moines Daily News as a journalist. Her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered, was published in 1809 and her short stories were both sold to magazines such as Harper's and The Ladies' Home Journal. Glaspell married to George Cram Cook who was known as a classics professor, a novelist and poet. They later moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and founded the Provincetown Players theatre group in 1915 with some friends. She originally wrote "A Jury of Her Peers" as a play entitled "Trifles", it was written in just ten short days. The play was produced in 1916 and in 1917 she rewrote it as a short story "A Jury of Her Peers." The influence for this short story came from a murder that Glaspell covered while working for the Des Moines Daily News, as a reporter. Later Susan was the one to arrange the first reading of a play by Eugene O'Neill and help launched his career. Glaspell writing is "strongly feminist, dealing with the roles that women play, or are forced to play, in society and the relationships between men and women." While there she wrote more than ten plays, including Women's Honor (1918), Bernice (1919), Inheritors (1921), and The Verge (1922). In 1922, Susan and her husband, Cook, left the theatre and moved to Delphi, Greece where Cook studied a wrote. He later died there in 1924. Glaspell returned to Provincetown and wrote "The Road to the Temple" a biography of her late husband. In 1931, she won a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in her play, "Alison's House," a play loosely based on the life and family of Emily Dickerson. Susan Glaspell spent the latter part of her life writing in Cape Cod, she later died in Provincetown in 1948.

Works Cited

Glaspell, Susan. "The Trifles." Literature: An Introduction to Reading and Writing.

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