Susan Glaspell was a Pulitzer Prize-winning dramatist and best-selling author who wrote fourteen plays, nine novels, and over fifty short stories, essays, and articles. Her life parallels the intellectual and cultural patterns that were developing in America between the end of the Civil War and the middle of the twentieth century. She was born in 1876, the descendant of pioneer settlers, in Davenport , Iowa, and was raised in the nineteenth-century tradition that idealized patriotism, piety, competition, progress, and respectability. Like many young Americans who became adults as the new century began, she rebelled against these values and the conventions of midwestern culture with which they were associated, seeking the freedom to experiment with new ways of living and writing in Chicago, Greenwich Village, and Europe. During the 1920s she enjoyed critical acclaim and popularity, both in her own country and abroad, but after the triumph of winning the Pulitzer...