Glaspell was an esteemed author and playwright in her own time and also well-known for cofounding the Provincetown Players and launching the career of Eugene O'Neill. In 1918, the New York Times hailed her as “one of the two or three foremost and most promising contemporaneous writers of the one-act play.” Despite her popularity, however, Alison's House was never a resounding success. J. Brooks Atkinson, reporting for the New York Times on the off-Broadway production of Alison's House in December 1930, writes that it is “haunted by genius” but that it is “a disappointingly elusive play.” John Chamberlain, as an aside while reviewing Glaspell's novel Ambrose Holt, comments that Alison's House “does its best before a badly sentimental close.”

When it was announced in May 1931 that Glaspell had won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama with Alison's House, critics became more heated in their remarks. Atkinson devoted an entire...