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Susan Glaspell was born in Davenport, Iowa in 1882. A young journalist she became friends with two other writers from the town, Floyd Dell and George Gig Cook. Glaspell had some success with her novel The Glory of the Conquered and a collection of short-stories, Lifted Masks (1912).

In 1916 Glaspell became involved in the Provincetown Theatre Group. The play, Suppressed Desires, that she co-wrote with her husband, George Gig Cook, was one of the first plays performed by the group. Others who wrote or acted for the group included Eugene O'Neill, Floyd Dell, Louise Bryant and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

Over the next few years Glaspell wrote a series of plays including Trifles (1916), The People (1917), The Outside (1917), Woman's Honour (1918), Inheritors (1921) and The Verge (1921). An account of her life with George Gig Young, The Road to the Temple, was published after his death in Greece in 1923.

Later works by Glaspell included a book of short-stories, A Jury of Her Peers (1927) and two novels, Brook Evans (1928) and The Fugitive's Return (1929). Alison's House, a play based on the life of Emily Dickenson, was first performed in 1930. Susan Glaspell, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Alison's House, died in 1948.

 

 

 

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(1) In his autobiography Homecoming, Floyd Dell wrote about how George Gig Cook met Susan Glaspell in 1903.

George and I called upon Susan Glaspell, a young newspaperwoman who began a brilliant career as a novelist. She read us some of her just-finished novel, The Glory of the Conquered, the liveliness and humour of which we admired greatly, though George deplored to me on the way home the lamentable conventionality of the author's views of life. Susan was a slight, gentle, sweet, whimsically humourous girl, a little ethereal in appearance, but evidently a person of great energy, and brimful of talent; but, we agreed, too medieval-romantic in her views of life.


(2) Susan Glaspell wrote about Eugene O'Neill's play, Bound East for Cardiff at Provincetown in her book, Road to the Temple (1923)

I may see it through memories too emotional but it seems to me I have never sat before a more moving performance than our Bound East for Cardiff, when Eugene O'Neill was produced for the first time on any stage. Jig was Yank. As he lay in his bunk dying, he talked of life as one who knew he must leave it.

The sea had been good to Eugene O'Neill. It was there for his opening. There was a fog, just as the script demanded, fog bell in the harbour. The tide was in, and it washed under us and around, spraying through the holes in the floor, giving us the rhythm and the flavour of the sea while the big dying sailor talked to his friend Drisc of the life he had always wanted deep in the land, where you'd never see a ship or smell the sea.


(3) Floyd Dell wrote about Susan Glaspell and George Gig Cook in 1961.

My friend George Cook died in Greece in 1926. I had heard that he got with the shepherds, and was adored by them. Susan Glaspell has told the story of those days with great sympathy in The Road to the Temple. Susan Glaspell has said in her book that she has sometimes thought I would write a book about George. He was too close to me to be just to him. I loved him, and I would have had his life and death other than they were. I would have him die for Russia and the future, rather than Greece and the past. And if I wrote a book about George, that is what I should wish him to do.

 

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