Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

by Linda Ben-Zvi

Overview

Trifles—a play exploring what happens when women unite against forces that deny them a voice and identity—has become an international classic, as powerful and relevant today as it was in the summer of 1916, when it was first staged by vacationing friends in a converted fishing wharf in Provincetown,Massachusetts. This biography is the story of its author, Susan Glaspell, and the forces that propelled her from her Midwest birthplace in Davenport, Iowa to Greenwich Village during its glory days, where she established herself as a central figure in the avant-garde community and became the first modern American woman playwright. Glaspell's life is a feminist tale of pioneering in which she broke new ground for women. A journalist by age eighteen, she worked her way through university as a news reporter and became a leading novelist of the period. A co-founder of many of Greenwich Village's important avant-garde institutions, she was a close friend of its leading figures, including Eugene O'Neill. She and O'Neill were equally credited with launching a new type of indigenous drama, hers addressing such pressing topics as suffrage, birth control, female sexuality, marriage equality, socialism, and pacifism. In 1931 she won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

"Out there—lies all that's not been touched—lies life that waits," Claire Archer says in The Verge, Glaspell's most experimental play. This biography is the exciting and inspiring story of Glaspell's personal exploration of the same terrain

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780195313239
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	07/01/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	492
Product dimensions:	0.10(w) x 0.10(h) x 0.10(d)

About the Author

Linda Ben-Zvi is Professor of Theatre Studies at Tel Aviv University and Professor Emerita of English and Theatre at Colorado State University.

Table of Contents

AcknowledgementsPreface: A Pioneering LifeIntroduction: Blackhawk's Land
Part I: Midwest Beginnings (1876-1907)1. A Town Springs Up2. Families In Fact and Fiction3. Society Girls4. Delphic Days5. "Murder, She Wrote": The Genesis of Trifles6. Chicago
Part II: Susan and Jig (1907-1913)7. A Greek Out of Time8. The Monist Society9. Letters to Mollie10. Travel at Home and Abroad11. Though Stone Be Broken12. Staging Area for the Future
Interlude 1: Greenwich Village 1913, "The Joyous Season"Part III: The Provincetown Players (1914-1922)13. A Home by the Sea14. War and Peace15. A Theatre on a Wharf16. Summer 1916, Two Playwrights17. A New Kind of Theatre18. "Fire from Heaven" on MacDougal Street19. Here Pegasus was Hitched20. Inheritors21. The Verge and Beyond22. The End of the Dream
Interlude 2: Delphi 1922-1924, "The Road to the Temple"Part IV: Going On (1924-1948)23. Picking Up the Pieces24. Novel Times25. Alison's House26. Break Up27. The Federal Theatre Project28. A Different War29. Completing the CircleBibliographyNotes

Editorial Reviews

American playwright and novelist Susan Glaspell won the 1931 Pulitzer Prize in drama yet remains largely unknown outside of drama and/or feminist circles. By placing Glaspell into a historical and literary context, Ben-Zvi (English, emerita, Colorado State Univ.) hopes to bring Glaspell's work to a broader contemporary audience. Born in Davenport, IA, in 1876, Glaspell was fiercely independent and adventurous. By 18, she had worked her way through college as a reporter. After she and her husband moved to Greenwich Village in New York City, to pursue their literary and artistic dreams in 1913, they shot to the center of what became known as the American avant-garde. Their circle included Edmund Wilson, John Reed, Max Eastman, Sinclair Lewis, and Eugene O'Neill. Glaspell's plays reflected her sympathies toward topics not always considered suitable for American audiences-women's right to vote, birth control, female sexuality, equality in marriage, socialism, and pacifism. Sadly, unconvinced of her own importance in the world of letters, she didn't date her correspondences or diary entries, believing that they would be of no value outside her family circle. In an ideal world, this important scholarly biography would inspire a second look at Glaspell's oeuvre. Most likely, however, it will probably find an audience only in academic and public libraries with large collections in women's studies, theater, and American literature.-Pam Kingsbury, Univ. of North Alabama, Florence Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

"Linda Ben-Zvi's exhaustively researched and impressively detailed biography rescues Glaspell from her usual role as stage manager. This is a richly textured look at a writer who deserves—and will now surely receive—more attention."—Lisa MacFarlane, American Literature

"An important scholarly biography."—Library Journal

"Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times provides a thoroughly researched, richly detailed, and eminently readable analysis of Glaspell's professional rise from 'society girl' reporting in her native Iowa to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of international fame.... This critical biography, which complements and expands without duplicating existing scholarship, is the product of nearly twenty years of meticulous investigation.... In addition to scrupulous literary detection and astute critical insight, readers will appreciate Ben-Zvi's lucid, engaging, jargon-free prose. Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times is highly recommended for anyone interested in Glaspell, women's biography, American theatre and drama, or the fascinating era in which Glaspell lived and worked."—Theatre Journal

"Ben-Zvi animates her scholarly sources to create a fully rounded narrative, carefully reconstructing the life and times of a complex woman who often guarded her privacy.... If ever a thick, scholarly book could be recommended as a Provincetown summer read, a book you can even take to the beach, this one is it."—Provincetown Banner

"Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times both complements the burgeoning field of Glaspell studies and provides nuanced and fresh readings of Glaspell's oeuvre.... Ben-Zvi provides new and distinct perspectives on the individuals and events connected with the legendary company (Provincetown Players).... Ben-Zvi's deep engagement with Glaspell's texts, career, friendships, loves, and beliefs complements her portrait of a woman experiencing some of the most eventful periods of recent U.S. history."—HotReview.org

"Once ranked with Shaw and O'Neill, winner of the 1931 Pulitzer Prize, the prolific and pioneering American playwright and novelist Susan Glaspell has disappeared from standard literary history. Linda Ben-Zvi's fascinating critical biography of Glaspell restores an important American writer to twentieth-century cultural history. Move over, Millay!"—Elaine Showalter, Princeton University

"If Susan Glaspell has said it for women, Linda Ben-Zvi has said it for Glaspell. What she has said, through a virtual travelogue of fastidious research, impelled by the persistence of unaccountable neglect, is a kind of poetic justice."—Herbert Blau, University of Washington

"A much welcome and most necessary biography. We don't know nearly enough about the pioneering writer Susan Glaspell; her story seems to have been passed over. Linda Ben Zvi's engaging and informative work restores this fine writer to her rightful place at the center of the American stage and makes us Glaspell's eager and avid audience."—Suzan-Lori Parks, Winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Drama

From the Publisher