Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

by Linda Ben-Zvi

Book Overview

"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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195115066
• ISBN13: 9780195115062
• Release Date: April 2005
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 506 Pages
• Weight: 1.90 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.5" x 9.3" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

Writing a Woman's Life

Although little-known today, in her heyday (c. 1910-1940) Susan Glaspell was one of the most notable literary figures of her generation, a best-selling novelist, critically-acclaimed playwright, and a cultural leader of the modernist avant-garde, a legendary circle that shifted geographically from Chicago to New York to Paris, and included playwright Eugene O'Neill, novelists Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos, poets Djuna Barnes and Edna St. Vincent Millay, painter Georgia O'Keefe, labor journalists Jack Reed and Mary Heaton Vorse, anarchist activist Emma Goldman, and salon hostess Mabel Dodge Luhan. In Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times, author Linda Ben-Zvi provides a thoroughly researched, richly detailed, and imminently readable analysis of Susan Glaspell's professional rise from "society girl" reporting in her native Iowa to Pulitzer-prize winning playwright of international fame, and an equally rich exploration of Glaspell's private life, including her marriage to the charismatic and iconoclastic George Cram ("Jig") Cook and her eight year liaison with writer Norman Matson, seventeen years Glaspell's junior. Ben-Zvi offers critical summaries of all of Glaspell's major works, including her nine novels, eleven plays, and her fascinating, genre-blurring auto/biography, The Road to the Temple. Born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1876, Susan Glaspell was, as Ben-Zvi writes, a "pioneer" and a "venturesome feminist" in art and life, one of the first generation of American women to embrace socialism, feminism, and self-realization as a woman and a citizen. Glaspell's fictional counterparts, in her novels, short stories, and plays were similarly strong women who "continually pushed against fixed boundaries." Ben-Zvi, who has published extensively on Glaspell, brings to her analysis a thorough knowledge of the social and aesthetic context within which Glaspell lived and worked. She brings the story of Susan Glaspell to life, and her remarkable account of one woman's remarkable life is highly recommended for anyone interested in Glaspell, women's biography, or American social and cultural history. Cheryl Black