“The biggest stories are written about the things which draw human beings closer together.” – Susan Glaspell
A Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, actress, novelist, and journalist, Glaspell founded – along with husband George Cram Cook – the Provincetown Players, America’s first modern American theater company. And, during the Great Depression she served in the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project, created as a relief measure to employ artists, writers, directors and theater workers during that terrible ordeal.
Born on this date in 1876, Glaspell was a prolific writer, producing 9 novels, 15 plays, over 50 short stories, and a biography, often setting her semi-autobiographical stories in her native Iowa. She is often cited as our country’s first important modern female playwright, and her one-act play Trifles is considered one of the greatest works of American theater. Written in 1916, it was adapted as a short story and 50 years later as a movie under the title A Jury of Her Peers.
Inspired by the great Nellie Bly, Glaspell started her journalistic career at age 18, working first at a weekly newspaper and then as the Des Moines Daily News’ first full-time female reporter while also studying at Drake University.
“I am so glad I worked on a newspaper,” she later said, “because it made me know I had to write whether I felt like it or
not. And I loved it!”
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