Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction

The career of Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) follows closely the trajectory of other "reclaimed" American women writers of the century such as Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Zora Neale Hurston: well known in her time, effaced from canonical consideration after her death, rediscovered years later through the surfacing of one work around which critical attention has focused. Glaspell, a contemporary of Eugene O'Neill, was a respected international playwright and novelist who amassed some of the most impressive credentials in American theater history, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1931. Over the past fifteen years, she has been rediscovered through the work of leading feminist scholars, and her one-act play Trifles and its short story form, "A Jury of Her Peers," have become classics.

Susan Glaspell: Essays on Her Theater and Fiction is the first collection devoted to the body of Glaspell's work. The book provides an array of perspectives on the writer and her art and features the first complete Glaspell bibliography, including references to original reviews of Glaspell's plays and fiction and recent critical studies of her writing.

Linda Ben-Zvi is Professor of English and Theater Studies, Colorado State University, and Professor of Theater, Tel Aviv University. She is the editor of Women in Beckett: Performance and Critical Perspectives and of Theater in Israel (forthcoming).