Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

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

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Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

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

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Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

by Linda Ben-Zvi
Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

by Linda Ben-Zvi

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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, USA
Publication date: 07/12/2007
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

Acknowledgements
Preface: A Pioneering Life
Introduction: Blackhawk's Land
Part I: Midwest Beginnings (1876-1907)
1. A Town Springs Up
2. Families In Fact and Fiction
3. Society Girls
4. Delphic Days
5. "Murder, She Wrote": The Genesis of Trifles
6. Chicago
Part II: Susan and Jig (1907-1913)
7. A Greek Out of Time
8. The Monist Society
9. Letters to Mollie
10. Travel at Home and Abroad
11. Though Stone Be Broken
12. 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 Sea
14. War and Peace
15. A Theatre on a Wharf
16. Summer 1916, Two Playwrights
17. A New Kind of Theatre
18. "Fire from Heaven" on MacDougal Street
19. Here Pegasus was Hitched
20. Inheritors
21. The Verge and Beyond
22. 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 Pieces
24. Novel Times
25. Alison's House
26. Break Up
27. The Federal Theatre Project
28. A Different War
29. Completing the Circle
Bibliography
Notes

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