Discussion: Trifles Character Sketches

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Susan Keating Glaspell Date: 1974 From: Dictionary of American Biography Publisher: Gale Document Type: Biography Length: 965 words Content Level: (Level 5) Lexile Measure: 1320L

About this Person Born: July 01, 1876 in Davenport, Iowa, United States Died: July 27, 1948 in Provincetown, Massachusetts, United States Nationality: American Occupation: Writer Other Names: Glaspell, Susan Keating Full Text: Glaspell, Susan Keating (July 1, 1876 - July 27, 1948), author, was born in Davenport, Iowa, the second of three children and only daughter of Elmer S. Glaspell and Alice (Keating) Glaspell. Her mother was born in New York City of Irish parents recently arrived from Dublin. The Glaspells were early Americans of English descent and among the first white settlers in Iowa. A dealer in hay and feed who never earned much, Elmer Glaspell was unable to give his daughter material advantages, but being a man of sharp contradictions--he was devoutly religious (a member of the Disciples of Christ) yet a fervent admirer of racehorses; he prayed and he swore with equal relish--he unwittingly gave the future author a running lesson in the complexities of human nature. Accompanying him to farms in their home state and in the Dakotas, Susan early developed "a feeling of the wideness and richness" of the region, a love of the land and its plain people that would be incarnated in the many idealized, if not sentimentalized, Midwesterners who throng her writings.

A bright pupil in the schools of Davenport, Susan was generally expected to be a teacher, but she early dreamed of a literary career and on completing high school became a reporter at $3 a week for her hometown paper. At Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, she helped pay her way as college correspondent for a local newspaper, and, in 1899, immediately after graduating with a Ph.B. degree, she went to work for the Des Moines Daily News. Slightly built, with brown eyes and light brown hair demurely parted in the middle, she appeared almost other-worldly, but she was shrewdly observant and had great drive. After covering politics, murder trials, and "other excitements" for less than two years, she felt she had accumulated so much story material that, in her words, "I recklessly gave up my job and went home to Davenport to have a try at the magazines."

While still on the News she had sold several short stories to Youth's Companion; from 1903 until she abandoned the genre in 1922, her stories became a familiar feature in leading magazines. More than half of her tales--she published forty-three in all--were set in "Freeport" (Davenport), enabling her to freshen what all too often were stale situations and conventional plots with local color and realistic detail. Lifted Masks (1912), a collection of her magazine stories, is typical of her writing in this period. In 1909 her first novel was published, The Glory of the Conquered, a romantic bonbon similar in quality to her magazine pieces. By the time she wrote The Visioning (1911), a better work, she had lived abroad a year and had come under the influence of George Cram Cook, the strange, rebellious son of a prominent Davenport family. Echoing his radicalism, though in a softer key, she sympathetically depicted a socialist in The Visioning. Essentially, however, she remained a grassroots idealist, an apolitical libertarian. She and Cook were married on April 14, 1913, and settled in Provincetown, Mass.

While continuing to sell magazine stories for a living, Susan Glaspell readily fell under the sway of the untrammeled, yet earnest, spirit of her husband's circle, which came to include Hutchins Hapgood and John Reed, the radical journalist. Under Cook's leadership a theater was founded in Provincetown in 1915. The following year, after Eugene O'Neill had joined the group, the Provincetown Players moved to Greenwich Village. Among those who wrote and acted in the plays was Edna St. Vincent Millay. A bulwark of the playhouse, second only to O'Neill, Glaspell between 1915 and 1922 wrote seven short plays, including, in collaboration with Cook, the popular Suppressed Desires (1915), which deflated the chic but naïve Freudianism of Village sophisticates. Of her four long plays of this period, the best were Inheritors (1921), a drama of social protest at a Midwestern college, and The Verge (1922), a study of a Nietzschean woman.

The Cooks devoted their winters to the playhouse and passed their summers in Provincetown, with Cook's two children by a previous marriage. During their second summer Glaspell learned that she had a heart condition and, later, that she was unable to bear children. Her restless husband found the success of the Provincetown Playhouse unsettling, and in 1922 they moved to Greece,

where they lived happily until his untimely death in 1924.

Returning to Cape Cod, Glaspell resumed her writing. As a playwright she had served a public more demanding than her magazine readers. Under this new discipline her stories became more substantive, but only in "Jury of Her Peers" (1917) did she write one of lasting quality; significantly, this somber little gem was adapted from Trifles (1916), her finest one-act play. Her remaining plays were The Comic Artist (1928), written with Norman Matson, whom she married in 1925 and divorced six years later, and Alison's House (1930), a drama inspired by the life of Emily Dickinson that won the 1931 Pulitzer Prize.

After Fidelity (1915), Glaspell did not publish another novel until Brook Evans (1928), which was more artfully constructed than her previous ones but displayed no improvement in literary grace. The heightened skill derived from writing plays is more evident in Ambrose Holt and Family (1931), The Morning Is Near Us (1939), and Judd Rankin's Daughter (1945). All three, like so much of her writing, have a distinct regional feeling, and each centers on a Midwestern woman trying to reconcile the traditional and nurturing values of the American past with the demands of the present. Probably her finest work is neither a novel nor a play but The Road to the Temple (1927), an informal biography of George Cram Cook. In 1948 Glaspell died in Provincetown of a pulmonary embolism and was cremated in Boston.

FURTHER READINGS: [Arthur E. Waterman, Susan Glaspell (1966), and his sketch in Notable Am. Women, II, 49-51; Glaspell's The Road to the Temple; Helen Deutsch and Stella Hanau, The Provincetown (1931); the Cook-Glaspell papers in the Berg Collect., N.Y. Public Lib.; Louis Sheaffer, O'Neill, Son and Playwright (1968); information from Rev. Albert Glaspell, a cousin. Though Miss Glaspell always gave 1882 as her birth year, the Iowa state census of May 1895, which lists her as 18, and the enrollment records of Drake University establish that she was born in 1876.]

Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition) "Susan Keating Glaspell." Dictionary of American Biography, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974. Gale In Context: Biography, https://link-

gale-com.ezp.pasadena.edu/apps/doc/BT2310012750/BIC?u=pasa19871&sid=BIC&xid=85f30ac5. Accessed 18 May 2020. Gale Document Number: GALE|BT2310012750