Plays by Susan Glaspell [Paperback]

A cofounder of the Provincetown Players, Susan Glaspell can also lay claim to be a major figure in her own right.Four long-neglected works: Trifles (1916): The Outside (1917); The Verge (1921): and Inheritors (1921) reveal the creative innovation of one of the first women playwrights in the history of American drama.Four long-neglected works: Trifles (1916): The Outside (1917); The Verge (1921): and Inheritors (1921) reveal the creative innovation of one of the first women playwrights in the history of American drama.A cofounder of the Provincetown Players and winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Drama, Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) was one of the first female playwrights. Although long neglected, the four plays collected in this critical edition reveal the thoroughly modern nature of her concerns. Trifles (1916) develops a feminist critique of social role, while The Outside (1917) stages a debate between the life force and a perverse celebration of death. In The Verge (1921), Glaspell presented an experimental work of considerable proportions, more daring in many ways than anything attempted by O'Neill. And though Inheritors (1921) is far more conventional, it nonetheless questions the nature and reality of American pieties. Long known for a single play, Glaspell now emerges as a significant figure in the history of American drama, a woman of genuine creative innovation.Introduction; Biographical record; Trifles; The Outside; The Verge; Inheritors; The plays of Susan Glaspell; Select bibliography.