Susan Glaspell
1882?-1948
Other Works
Suppressed Desires
The Outside
Bernice
Lifted Masks
Surprise Request A year after Susan Glaspell and her husband, George Cook, founded an experimental Massachusetts theater group, The Provincetown Players, in 1915, they found themselves in need of new scripts. Cook told his wife, "Now, Susan, I have announced a play of yours for the next bill." A shocked Glaspell protested that she had no play, to which Cook responded that she would have to write one.
The Birth of Trifles As Glaspell sat down in front of the theater group's stage the next day, she reflected on her days as a newspaper reporter in her home state of Iowa. Glaspell had once covered a murder trial and had never forgotten how she felt in the kitchen of the woman who sat in jail, accused of murdering her husband. Glaspell had wanted to turn the event into a short story one day, but after a time, sitting there, the bare stage became a kitchen. As Glaspell put it, the stage took the story "for its own," and ten days later Trifles was born, becoming Glaspell's most popular play. One critic said that "Trifles is not simply a play of detection, in which two women discover the missing motive for a murder and decide to suppress the evidence ... it is a play about compassion."
Plays and Novels For the Provincetown Players, Glaspell wrote, directed, and sometimes acted in nine more plays between 1917 and 1922. Then, following the sudden death of George Cook in Greece in 1924, Glaspell wrote The Road to the Temple, a moving memorial to her husband. Later she wrote her most acclaimed play, Alison's House, which is loosely based on the life of Emily Dickinson. Alison's House won the 1931 Pulitzer Prize, but Glaspell wrote only one play afterward, instead concentrating on writing novels. Most of her writing features strong women characters dealing with psychological conflicts often caused by roles they are expected to play in society.
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