Susan Keating Glaspell (July 1, 1876 - July 28, 1948) was an American playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. With her husband George Cram Cook she founded the Provincetown Players, the first modern American theatre company. During the Great Depression, she served in the Works Progress Administration as Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project. Glaspell is known to have composed nine novels, fifteen plays, over fifty short stories, and one biography.
Early life and career
Susan Glaspell was born in Iowa in 1876 to Elmer Glaspell, a hay farmer, and his wife Alice Keating, 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. Having a fairly conservative upbringing, "Susie" was remembered as "a precocious child" who would often rescue stray animals. With the family farm increasingly surrounded by residential development, Glaspell's worldview was shaped by the pioneer tales of her grandmother, who told of regular visits by Indians to the farm in the years before Iowa statehood. Growing up directly across the river from Black Hawk's ancestral village, Glaspell was also influenced by the Sauk leader's autobiography; he wrote that Americans should be worthy inheritors of the land. During the Panic of 1893, her father sold the farm and Glaspell moved with her family into the city.  Glaspell was an accomplished student in Davenport's public schools, taking an advanced course of study and giving a commencement speech at her 1894 graduation. By age eighteen she was earning a regular salary as a journalist for a local newspaper, and by twenty, she wrote a weekly 'Society' column which lampooned Davenport's upper class. At twenty-one Glaspell enrolled at Drake University, against the local belief that college made women unfit for marriage. A philosophy major, she excelled in male-dominated debate competitions, winning the right to represent Drake at the state debate tournament her senior year. A Des Moines Daily News article on her graduation ceremony cited Glaspell as "a leader in the social and intellectual life of the university." The day after graduation, Glaspell began working full-time for the Des Moines paper as a reporter, a rare position for a woman, particularly as she was assigned to cover the state legislature and murder cases.  After covering the conviction of a woman accused of murdering her abusive husband, Glaspell abruptly resigned at age twenty-four and moved back to Davenport to focus on writing fiction. Unlike many new writers, she readily had her stories accepted and was published by the most widely read periodicals, including Harper's, Munsey's, Ladies' Home Journal, and Woman's Home Companion. It was a golden age of short stories. She used a large cash prize from a short story magazine to finance her move to Chicago, where she wrote her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered, published in 1909. A best-seller, The New York Times declared, "Unless Susan Glaspell is an assumed name covering that of some already well-known author--and the book has qualities so out of the ordinary in American fiction and so individual that this does not seem likely--The Glory of the Conquered brings forward a new author of fine and notable gifts." Glaspell's second novel, The Visioning, was published in 1911. The New York Times said of the book, "it does prove Miss Glaspell's staying power, her possession of abilities that put her high among the ranks of American storytellers." Her third novel, Fidelity, was published in 1915. The New York Times described it as "a big and real contribution to American novels."
Where did Susan grow up?
Susan Glaspell was born in Iowa in 1876 to Elmer Glaspell,
Susan Glaspell was born in Iowa in 1876 to Elmer Glaspell,