A Research on Major Playwright- Susan Glaspell

 Susan Glaspell, the daughter of Elmer Glaspell and Alice Keating, was born in Davenport, Iowa on 1st July 1876. She graduated from Drake University in Des Moines in 1899 and found work as a journalist with the Des Moines Daily News.
           
                Much of Glaspell's writing is strongly feminist, dealing with the roles that women play, or are forced to play, in society and the relationships between men and women. She wrote more than ten plays for the Provincetown Players, including Women's Honor, Bernice, Inheritors, and The Verge. In 1922 Glaspell married George Cook and moved to New York City, where she continued to write, mostly fiction. In 1931 she won the Pulitzer Prize for Alison's House, a play based loosely on the life and family of Emily Dickinson. Glaspell spent the latter part of her life on Cape Cod writing.She also wrote Trifles, a play based on the John Hossack case, for the group. It has been argued that the play is an example of early feminist drama. Heywood Broun was one of those who saw the significance of the play: "No direct statements are made for the benefit of the audience. Like the women, they must piece out the story by inference... The story is brought to mind vividly enough to induce the audience to share the sympathy of the women for the wife and agree with them that the trifles which tell the story should not be revealed."

            She also had been critics because her vivid use of offstage characters in Trifles will become a hallmark of her playwriting, recurring in Bernice, Inheritors, and Alison's House, among others. Mysteries and the process of deduction also recur throughout her plays, making Trifles both a representative work and one that adumbrates the themes and methods of many of her subsequent drarnas. Moreover, with Trifles she develops her technique of conscious manipulation of audiences' perspectives, so that they can see as she has done, which then allows her feminist and other progressive political views to come to the fore."

word cited:

webpage:

• Susan, G.. N.p.. Web. 3 Nov 2013. <http://www.learner.org/interactives/literature/notread/author.html>. 
• Bradford, W.. N.p.. Web. 3 Nov 2013. <http://plays.about.com/od/plays/a/trifles.htm> 
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PBAMcE-sHvM