Susan Glaspell Author & Playwright

 

Susan Glaspell

Susan Glaspell grew up in Davenport, Iowa, a town buzzing with riverboats, factories, and immigrant families trying to build new lives. Born in 1876, she always had a book in one hand and a question in the other. Teachers spotted her quick wit early on. She devoured the classics, argued in debates, and seemed destined for something bigger.

After high school, she cruised into the newspaper world. Most girls her age were expected to type, sew, or marry. Susan grabbed a pencil and notebook instead.

Her assignments started small—school contests, local fairs, church bazaars. She made them sparkle anyway. A strawberry social sounded like Shakespeare when she wrote about it. Before long, editors trusted her with meatier stories.

She left Davenport for Des Moines, where she landed a job at the Daily News. It was there that she got her first taste of crime reporting. The Daily News didn’t coddle her with “ladies’ page” fluff. They sent her to courtrooms, into the thick of murder trials, and out onto snow-covered farm roads.

The biggest story of her young career broke in December 1900. A farmer named John Hossack had been bludgeoned in his bed with an axe. His wife, Margaret, said she was asleep beside him and never saw the killer, but suspicion quickly fell on her. Neighbors whispered about fights in the marriage, about Margaret being stern, about years of quarrels that made her seem cold.

Susan traveled south to Indianola to cover the trial. Her very first story ran under the stark headline: “Prominent Farmer Robbed and Killed.” The next day’s dispatch tightened the suspense: “Surrounded by Mystery.” Readers across Iowa were hooked.

In court, Susan took it all in. She described Margaret Hossack as a woman of “hard features, dark eyes, and a mouth set with determination.” She noted how Margaret’s shawl slipped from her shoulders as she sat, unflinching, while neighbor after neighbor painted her as cold and unhappy.

The courtroom buzzed, jurors shifting uneasily. Susan’s pencil flew. In another article, Susan wrote that the accused “showed no emotion save when her children came to her. Then she was as one suddenly softened, her eyes full of tears.” To readers in Des Moines, that detail cut through the legal wrangling. Was Margaret a murderer—or simply a woman trapped?

The trial dragged on. Margaret was convicted  and then later retried. When the second jury deadlocked, Susan described the scene: “The prisoner sat with head bowed. For the first time, her composure faltered, her shoulders shaking.”

Susan had gone to cover a murder. What she came away with was a revelation about how women lived, how their emotions and burdens were discounted or twisted into suspicion. That revelation followed her for the rest of her career.

Years later, she turned it into art. Her short story “A Jury of Her Peers” and her one-act play Trifles grew directly from those courthouse hours. In them, two farm wives notice small domestic details—a broken birdcage, an unfinished quilt—that the men ignore. The men dismiss these as “trifles.” The women see them as proof of a desperate, silenced life.

Critics were quick to praise the play. One called it “like finely stitched linen: delicate but tough.” Another said it captured “the small things men miss, the quiet clues that women understand.” Audiences were startled. Here was a drama not of kings or generals, but of kitchens and sewing baskets, and yet it carried the weight of tragedy.

Susan had already left full-time reporting by then. After her time at the Daily News, she studied philosophy at Drake University, earning her degree when few women did. Friends thought she might teach. Instead, she turned to short stories. Before long, her name appeared in Harper’s and The Ladies’ Home Journal.

Then came George Cram Cook, Jig to his friends. He was a restless dreamer, a writer with a bohemian streak. They married, quarreled, made up, and kept dreaming. Eventually, they landed in Provincetown, Massachusetts, a tiny fishing village that had become a magnet for artists and free spirits.

One summer evening in 1915, they teamed up with some friends and put on a play on the beach. That impromptu show gave birth to the Provincetown Players, a theater collective that changed American drama.

The Players specialized in daring new work. They staged experimental plays in shacks and lofts, where audiences sat elbow to elbow with the actors. They gave Eugene O’Neill his first break. Susan wrote some of their most enduring plays—Trifles, Inheritors, The Verge. She drew on her Iowa roots, showing how small-town gossip and ordinary domestic lives held deep wells of conflict and injustice.

Her writing style was celebrated for its natural dialogue. Reviewers said she had “an ear for the way real people speak, stripped of artifice.” Her plays startled New York audiences, who weren’t used to farm kitchens and women’s chatter being treated as high drama.

Susan didn’t confine herself to plays. She wrote novels filled with Midwestern landscapes and characters drawn from memories of her time in Iowa. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for Alison’s House, a play loosely inspired by Emily Dickinson. Critics called it “a work of quiet power” and praised its “tender honesty.”

Jig died in Greece in 1924. Still, she kept working, teaching, writing, and mentoring. She remained a steady presence in the literary world even as her bohemian Provincetown years faded into the past.

Susan Glaspell died in 1948, her reputation already dimming.