Susan Glaspell 's literary reputation derives chiefly from the fourteen plays she wrote between 1915 and 1930, most of them for the Provincetown Players. Along with Eugene O'Neill she was the most important playwright for that influential little theater. In addition to her plays, she wrote nine novels, forty-three short stories, a children's tale, plus a few essays and a biography of her husband, George Cram Cook. Like almost everything she wrote, her short stories reveal her midwestern background in both setting and attitude. Her beginnings as a writer closely parallel the development of the so-called local colorists, whose work, especially in short fiction, dominated magazine writing at the turn of the century. As she matured as a writer she developed techniques and themes that helped her avoid the excessive triteness and formula plots of much local-color writing, so that her later tales retain the romantic appeal of the earlier...