Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

By Linda Ben-Zvi

Book Overview

"Venturesome feminist," historian Nancy Cott's term, perfectly describes Susan Glaspell (1876-1948), America's first important modern female playwright, winner of the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for drama, and one of the most respected novelists and short story writers of her time. In her life she explored uncharted regions and in her writing she created intrepid female characters who did the same. Born in Davenport, Iowa, just as America entered its second century, Glaspell took her cue from her pioneering grandparents as she sought to rekindle their spirit of adventure and purpose. A journalist by age eighteen, she worked her way through university as a reporter. In 1913 she and her husband, fellow Davenport iconoclast George Cram "Jig" Cook, joined the migration of writers from the Midwest to Greenwich Village, and were at the center of the first American avant-garde. Glaspell was a charter member of its important institutions--the Provincetown Players, the Liberal Club, Heterodoxy--and a close friend of John Reed, Mary Heaton Vorse, Max Eastman, Sinclair Lewis, and Eugene O'Neill. Her plays launched an indigenous American drama and addressed pressing topics such as women's suffrage, birth control, female sexuality, marriage equality, socialism, and pacifism.

Although frail and ethereal, Glaspell was a determined rebel throughout her life, willing to speak out for those causes in which she believed and willing to risk societal approbation when she found love. At the age of thirty-five, she scandalized staid Davenport when she began an affair with then-married Jig Cook. After his death in Delphi, where they lived for two years, she began an eight-year relationship with a man seventeen years her junior. Youthful in appearance, she remained youthful and undaunted in spirit. "Out there--lies all that's not been touched--lies life that waits," Claire Archer says in The Verge, Glaspell's most experimental play. The biography of Susan Glaspell is the exciting story of her personal exploration of the same terrain.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195115066
• ISBN13: 9780195115062
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Length: 506 Pages
• Weight: 1.89 lbs.
• Dimensions: 6.3" x 1.5" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Writing a Woman's Life

Although little-known today, in her heyday (c. 1910-1940) Susan Glaspell was one of the most notable literary figures of her generation, a best-selling novelist, critically-acclaimed playwright, and a cultural leader of the modernist avant-garde, a legendary circle that shifted geographically from Chicago to New York to Paris, and included playwright Eugene O'Neill, novelists Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos, poets Djuna Barnes and Edna St. Vincent Millay, painter Georgia O'Keefe, labor journalists Jack Reed and Mary Heaton Vorse, anarchist activist Emma Goldman, and salon hostess Mabel Dodge Luhan. In Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times, author Linda Ben-Zvi provides a thoroughly researched, richly detailed, and imminently readable analysis of Susan Glaspell's professional rise from "society girl" reporting in her native Iowa to Pulitzer-prize winning playwright of international fame, and an equally rich exploration of Glaspell's private life, including her marriage to the charismatic and iconoclastic George Cram ("Jig") Cook and her eight year liaison with writer Norman Matson, seventeen years Glaspell's junior. Ben-Zvi offers critical summaries of all of Glaspell's major works, including her nine novels, eleven plays, and her fascinating, genre-blurring auto/biography, The Road to the Temple. Born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1876, Susan Glaspell was, as Ben-Zvi writes, a "pioneer" and a "venturesome feminist" in art and life, one of the first generation of American women to embrace socialism, feminism, and self-realization as a woman and a citizen. Glaspell's fictional counterparts, in her novels, short stories, and plays were similarly strong women who "continually pushed against fixed boundaries." Ben-Zvi, who has published extensively on Glaspell, brings to her analysis a thorough knowledge of the social and aesthetic context within which Glaspell lived and worked. She brings the story of Susan Glaspell to life, and her remarkable account of one woman's remarkable life is highly recommended for anyone interested in Glaspell, women's biography, or American social and cultural history. Cheryl Black