Notes

• ""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." "A journalist by age eighteen, she worked her way through college as a reporter. In 1913 she and her husband, George Cram "Jig" Cook, joined the migration of writers from the Midwest to Greenwich Village and were at the center of the first American avante-garde. Glaspell was a charter member of its important institutions - the Provincetown Players, the Liberal Club, Heterodoxy - and a close friend of John Reed, Mary Heaton Vorse, Max Eastman, Sinclair Lewis, and Eugene O’Neill. Her plays launched an indigenous American drama and addressed pressing topics such as women’s suffrage, birth control, female sexuality, marriage equality, socialism, and pacifism."–BOOK JACKET