Susan Glaspell : her life and times / Linda Ben-Zvi.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Ben-Zvi, Linda.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Glaspell, Susan, 1876-1948.
• Authors, American--20th century--Biography.
• Authors, American.
• Women in the theater.
• History.
• United States.
• Women and literature--United States--History--20th century.
• Women and literature.
• Women in the theater--United States--History--20th century.

Genre:

• Biographies.

Physical Description:

xvi, 476 pages, 15 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Oxford University Press, 2005.

Summary:

• "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 journalists by age eighteen, she worked her way through college 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 in her approach to life. "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.

Contents:

• Introduction: Blackhawk's Land 3
• Part I Midwest Beginnings, 1876-1907
• 1 A Town Springs Up 11
• 2 Families in Fact and Fiction 19
• 3 Society Girls 29
• 4 Delphic Days 35
• 5 The Genesis of Trifles 41
• 6 Chicago 53
• Part II Susan and Jig, 1907-13
• 7 A Greek Out of Time 63
• 8 The Monist Society 77
• 9 Letters to Mollie 85
• 10 Travel at Home and Abroad 93
• 11 Though Stone Be Broken 103
• 12 Staging Area for the Future 113
• Interlude 1 Greenwich Village, 1913: The Joyous Season 121
• Part III The Provincetown Players, 1914-22
• 13 A Home by the Sea 135
• 14 War and Peace 145
• 15 A Theatre on a Wharf 153
• 16 Summer 1916, Two Playwrights 165
• 17 A New Kind of Theatre 179
• 18 Fire from Heaven on MacDougal Street 191
• 19 Here Pegasus Was Hitched 203
• 20 Inheritors 217
• 21 The Verge and Beyond 235
• 22 The End of the Dream 251
• Interlude 2 Delphi, 1922-24: The Road to the Temple 263
• Part IV Going On, 1924-48
• 23 Picking Up the Pieces 293
• 24 Novel Times 317
• 25 Alison's House 331
• 26 Break Up 347
• 27 The Federal Theatre Project 359
• 28 A Different War 371
• 29 Completing the Circle 385.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [399]-444) and index.

ISBN:

0195115066

OCLC:

55124282

Publisher Number:

9780195115062