As early as 1922, Susan Glaspell was being hailed as "the playwright of woman's selfhood." Currently, this is the major claim for her lasting importance as a dramatist. Glaspell, however, was not merely a feminist but also one of the few experimental playwrights to emerge from the confusion of the little theatre movement in the United States--a movement which she, as much as anyone else, helped to inaugurate.

Susan Keating Glaspell was born 1 July 1882 (though her biographer, Arthur Waterman, suggests that Glaspell might have been born as many as six years earlier) in Davenport, Iowa, to Alice Keating and Elmer S. Glaspell. Hers was a middle-class and a not-very-well-off family. She received her education in the Davenport public schools and her B.A. from Drake University in nearby Des Moines. Upon her graduation in 1899, Glaspell joined the Des Moines News as a reporter. Encouraged by the acceptance of her...