Susan Keating Glaspell, born July 1, 1876, had a major role in shaping the American Theater of the 1920’s and 1930’s. With themes of regionalism, sexual tension and the search for meaning, Glaspell brought to the stage a challenge to the status quo and an outlook all her own. Best known and acknowledged for her co-founding of the Provincetown Players, Susan Glaspell was also awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Drama for Alison’s House and headed the Midwest Federal Theatre Project’s Writing Bureau in the 1930’s. Beginning her career as a reporter in Des Moines and later as a short story author, her change from fiction to drama is largely attributed to her marriage to George Cram Cook, also a co-founder of the Provincetown Players.

Susan Glaspell grew up enraptured with the stories told to her by her grandmother, in her home in Iowa. At the time of her birth, the blind drive for expansion along with things such as the “100% American Act” (a direct response to land taken over from the reeling Native Americans) is very telltale to how much of an impact her grandmother had on her. A major theme of Glaspell’s, pioneer, comes straight from the influence of her grandmother. Susan Glaspell took to heart her grandmother’s accounts of the atrocities and disrespect the Indians were subjected to. These stories were almost the exact opposite to what was being published and advertised at the time. Her disregard for what the media says can be linked to the learning at a very young age, how wrong “public opinion” can be.

Glaspell is accredited with bringing modernism to America, and is heralded as the country’s most important playwright and credited equally with Eugene O’Neill for initiating “the entrance of the United States drama into the deeper currents of continental waters.”

In 1916, Susan Glaspell co-founded the Provincetown Players, with husband George Cram Cook, and served as a writer, producer and actor for one of the most influential theater companies of it’s time. A part of the “Little Theater Movement,” the Provincetown Players essentially gave new artists the opportunity to experiment with new ideas along with the support of like-minded individuals. “Their sexual and aesthetic revolutionary acts helped usher in a new era in America's social and artistic life. A remarkable feature of the group was the (at the time) unusually large quantity and quality of participation of women, both in artistic and management functions.” It is with the Players that many of Glaspell’s works were performed and acclaimed: Trifles, The People, Close the Book, Woman's Honor, Bernice and The Verge, to name a few. It is Susan Glaspell’s Trifles that has been said to be “perhaps one of the best one acts written in America.” A one-act murder mystery exploiting gender assumptions, Trifles is one of the great feminist masterpieces. Yet it is years later (in 1931) and for her play, Alison’s House, that Glaspell receives the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.

Following Trifles, a series of Glaspell’s one-acts are produced, The People, Close the Book, and The Outside, that solidify her as one of the main players for the creation of modern American drama. As works are critiqued and praised, the Provincetown Players remain rooted in experimental theater, looking down upon any form of commercial success. This would soon change. With the explosion of O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, the open and “amateur” spirit the Players were based upon began to disintegrate. In response to this loss of spirit, Glaspell and Cook then move to Greece in 1922. After George’s death in 1924, Susan moves back to Provincetown and continues writing novels and playwriting. She also begins living with, and later marrying, Norman Matson, with whom she later collaborated with for the play “The Comic Artist.”

It seems with the end of her relationship with Matson, Susan decides to end her theater career as well. After leaving Matson, Glaspell writes no more plays, but receives constant acclaim for A Road to Temple, written while she lived with Matson, it is a biographical play based on the life she shared with George Cram Cook.

Susan Glaspell was one of the most influential and dynamic people of her time and yet today, she is virtually unknown. Much of this is attributed to her lack of organizing her life for biographical purposes, like many individuals at the time that wished to be remembered, such as her husband. Other reasons seemed to be that around 1940, derogatory remarks by influential theater commentators such as George Jean Nathan and Burns Mantle appear to have a significant impact on Glaspell’s standing. “The Gelb biography of Eugene O’Neill, which helped cement his placement as the American playwright of the early half of the century, ‘cast Glaspell as a very secondary character in that drama,’ in the words of Papke’s apt summart.” Susan Glaspell’s revival is widely seen to be a direct result of having A Jury of Her Peers (re-printed Trifles) printed in Mary Anne Ferguson’s “extremely influential” anthology Images of Women in Literature.