The Collected Plays
Susan Glaspell (1876–1948)
The contents of this book were first published 1916 ~ 1930. Text is in the public domain in countries where the copyright term is “Life+70” or less.
Susan Keating Glaspell (July 1, 1876 – July 28, 1948) was an American playwright, novelist, and journalist. She is known to have composed nine novels, fifteen plays, over fifty short stories, and one biography. Often set in her native Midwest, these semi-autobiographical tales typically explore contemporary social issues, such as gender, ethics, and dissent, while featuring deep, sympathetic characters who make principled stands, and characters in search of life’s meaning.
She is today recognized as a pioneering feminist writer and America’s first important modern female playwright. Her one-act play Trifles (1916) is frequently cited as one of the great works of American theater.
Trifles, and its short-story adaptation, “A Jury of Her Peers” have become staples of theater and Women’s Studies curricula across the United States and the world.
Inheritors (1921) was considered the first modern historical drama.
Alison’s House earned her the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
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This collection presents eleven of Glaspell’s plays.
The following are not included:
The Comic Artist (1927), co-written with her then-husband Norman H. Matson (1893–1965).
Free Laughter (1919),
Chains of Dew (1922), and
Springs Eternal (1943); all three published for the first time in 2010.
This is my own compilation. Texts were obtained from multiple files at the Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg. OCR and printer’s errors were silently corrected; punctuation, diacritics, and italics formatted. Titles are cross-linked to table of contents.
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