Susan Glaspell - Linda Ben-Zvi

"Venturesome feminist," historian Nancy Cott's term, perfectly describes playwright and novelist Susan Glaspell (1876-1948), who explored uncharted regions and opened up new areas for women who followed. Born in Davenport, Iowa, just as America entered its second century, Glaspell took her cue from her pioneering grandparents as she sought to rekindle their spirit of adventure and purpose. A journalist by age eighteen, she worked her way through university as a news reporter and later became one of the leading novelists of the period. In 1913 she and her husband, fellow Davenport iconoclast George Cram "Jig" Cook, joined the migration of writers from the Midwest to Greenwich Village, where they established the first American avant-garde. Glaspell became co-founder of many 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. She and O'Neill wrote the plays that launched modern American drama, hers addressing such pressing topics as suffrage, birth control, female sexuality, marriage equality, socialism, and pacifism. Although frail and ethereal, Glaspell was a determined rebel throughout her life, scandalizing staid Davenport when at age thirty-five she began an affair with then-married Jig. She lived a year in Paris, spent two in Delphi with Jig, and after his death began an eight-year affair with a man seventeen years her junior. Youthful in appearance, she remained youthful in her approach to life. "Out there--lies all that's not been touched--lies life that waits," Claire Archer says in The Verge, Glaspell's most experimental play. The biography of Susan Glaspell is the exciting story of her personal exploration of the same terrain.