Trifles
Susan Glaspell
Emily Trabold
A Little Bio from Linda Ben-Zvi
Susan Glaspell was born July 1, 1876 in Davenport, Iowa and died July 27, 1948. She married George "Jig" Cram Cook in 1913 and the two of them founded the Provincetown Players "She became a reporter for a local Davenport newspaper after high school and by twenty she was society editor and columnist, enjoining young women to care what they put into their heads as much as what they put on them. At a time when less than 2 percent of American women attended college, she put herself through Drake University in Des Moines, excelled in male-dominated debate tournaments, wrote for the literary magazine, and did freelance work for newspapers in the Iowa state capital. When she graduated, Susan got a permanent position as a reporter, rare for a woman, rarer still because she was assigned to cover the state legislature and murder cases - not the woman's page. After two years, she had amassed enough material to return home and begin writing fiction, her real calling. Success came quickly; within a year she was placing stories in leading national journals and winning prizes. By the time she moved to New York, she had already published a book of short stories and two novels and was being heralded as a new, original voice in American fiction. She had also spent a year in Paris between 1907 and 1908 and been exposes to the new art, music, dance, and theatre that was only just coming to America in 1913" (Ben-Zvi, viii-ix).
Located at 317 E 12th Street, Davenport, Iowa, circa 1986
Susan circa 1916
"Circa 1913, in front of her fireplace."
Located at 317 E 12th Street, Davenport, Iowa, circa 1986
"Over the next years, Glaspell would solidify her standing as an important fiction writer, critiquing small town Midwestern life... It was in theatre, however, that she made her greatest mark, heralded along with [Eugene] O'Neill as the country's most important playwright and credited equally with him for initiating "the entrance of the U.S. drama into the deeper currents of continental waters," as critic Isaac Goldberg described their epochal work with the Provincetown Players, the first indigenous American theatre company, which Susan and Jig founded. It would be her plays, more than O'Neill's, which introduced this new American drama to Britain... In 1931, her play Alison's House would receive the Pulitzer Prize.
By the 1950s and early 1960s, when they myths and legends of this magical Greenwich Village period were being shaped, she somehow got lost in the telling. After her death in 1948, her plays and novels were forgotten and allowed to go out of print." (Ben-Zvi, viii-ix).
She was given titles such as "wife, friend, and nurturer," familiar to traditional female roles. Linda Ben-Zvi describes her discovery of Glaspell's vast works of literature and drama and says she realized, "the extent of her erasure from the American dramatic and literary canon" (Ben-Zvi, x).
Linda on beginning research on Glaspell: "For the first time, I began to realize her importance to American theatre and the key role she played in the creative revolution that occurred in Greenwich Village in the first decades of the century. I also became aware of the complex social, cultural, political, and artistic forces that shaped her writing..." (Ben-Zvi, xi).