Susan Keating Glaspell was an American author, playwright, journalist and actress. She founded the Provincetown Players, the first modern American theatre company.
Background
Susan Keating Glaspell was born on July 1, 1876 in Davenport, Iowa, United States, to Elmer Glaspell, a hay farmer, and his wife Alice Keating Glaspell, a public school teacher. She had an older brother, Raymond, and a younger brother, Frank. She was raised on a rural homestead just below the bluffs of the Mississippi River along the western edge of Davenport, Iowa, on property bought from the US Government by her great-grandfather following the Black Hawk Purchase. During the Panic of 1893, her father sold the farm and Glaspell moved with her family into the city.
Education
Glaspell graduated from Davenport High School in 1894. At twenty-one Glaspell entered Drake University. She earned a doctorate at Drake University in 1899. She also did her postgraduate studies at the University of Chicago.
Career
Susan worked as reporter for Des Moines Daily News and Des Moines Capital in Des Moines, Iowa, from 1899 until 1901. Then she became freelance writer in Davenport, Iowa, from 1900 until 1911. From 1915 till 1922 she was co-founder and writer at Provincetown Players, Provincetown. In 1936 Glaspell was appointed Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project until 1938. Thereafter she wrote "The Morning is Near Us" (1939), "Norma Ashe" (1942), and "Judd Rankin's Daughter" (1945). Susan Glaspell died of viral pneumonia in Provincetown on July 28, 1948.
Achievements
Glaspell was highly regarded in her time. She won Pulitzer Prize for drama from Columbia University in 1931 for "Alison’s House". Her 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 most widely-read novelists". In 2003 the International Susan Glaspell Society was founded with the aim of promoting "the recognition of Susan Glaspell as a major American dramatist and fiction writer".
Quotations:
"There is good and there is bad in every human heart, and it is the struggle of life to conquer the bad with the good".
Membership
Glaspell wasa leading member of Heterodoxy, an early feminist debating group composed of the premier women's rights crusaders.
Personality
When Susan's relationship with Matson ended after eight years in 1932, she fell into her first and only period of low productivity as she struggled with depression, alcoholism, and poor health.
Quotes from others about the person
William Zorach: "She had only to be on the stage and the play and the audience came alive".
Connections
Glaspell married George Cram Cook in April 1913. In 1922 Glaspell and Cook moved to Delphi, Greece. Cook died there in 1924 of glanders. Glaspell returned to Cape Cod after Cook's death. During the late twenties she was romantically involved with the younger writer Norman H. Matson. They married in 1925. In 1932 Glaspell's relationship with Matson ended after eight years.
