Customer Reviews

Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times

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Although little-known today, in her heyday (c. 1910-1940) Susan Glaspell was one of the most notable literary figures of her generation, a best-selling novelist, critically-acclaimed playwright, and a cultural leader of the modernist avant-garde, a legendary circle that shifted geographically from Chicago to New York to Paris, and included playwright Eugene O'Neill, novelists Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos, poets Djuna Barnes and Edna St. Vincent Millay, painter Georgia O'Keefe, labor journalists Jack Reed and Mary Heaton Vorse, anarchist activist Emma Goldman, and salon hostess Mabel Dodge Luhan.

In Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times, author Linda Ben-Zvi provides a thoroughly researched, richly detailed, and imminently readable analysis of Susan Glaspell's professional rise from "society girl" reporting in her native Iowa to Pulitzer-prize winning playwright of international fame, and an equally rich exploration of Glaspell's private life, including her marriage to the charismatic and iconoclastic George Cram ("Jig") Cook and her eight year liaison with writer Norman Matson, seventeen years Glaspell's junior. Ben-Zvi offers critical summaries of all of Glaspell's major works, including her nine novels, eleven plays, and her fascinating, genre-blurring auto/biography, The Road to the Temple.

Born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1876, Susan Glaspell was, as Ben-Zvi writes, a "pioneer" and a "venturesome feminist" in art and life, one of the first generation of American women to embrace socialism, feminism, and self-realization as a woman and a citizen. Glaspell's fictional counterparts, in her novels, short stories, and plays were similarly strong women who "continually pushed against fixed boundaries."

Ben-Zvi, who has published extensively on Glaspell, brings to her analysis a thorough knowledge of the social and aesthetic context within which Glaspell lived and worked. She brings the story of Susan Glaspell to life, and her remarkable account of one woman's remarkable life is highly recommended for anyone interested in Glaspell, women's biography, or American social and cultural history.

Cheryl Black