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Susan Glaspell, a novelist and playwright, was a Pulitzer Prize winner for her play, “The Road to the Temple.” But her influence stretches much further than that: she was a founder of the Provincetown Players where she arranged for the first ever reading of a play by Eugene O’Neill.

Susan Keating Glaspell was born in Davenport on July 1, 1876. She earned a Bachelors degree from Drake University in 1899 and went to work as a reporter at the Des Moines Daily News. She sold her first short stories to women's magazines and her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered was published
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Glaspell shapes theatre, literature
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in 1909. She married George Cram Cook, who was a sometime classics professor, a novelist and poet, and a itinerant farmer. The couple moved to Provincetown, Massachusetts, and together with friends they founded the influential Provincetown Players theatre group in 1915. The group produced plays by both Cook and Glaspell, as well as helping to launch the career of Eugene O'Neill. Glaspell wrote several plays for the Provincetown Players, acting in and producing some of them.

Glaspell kept company with many of the era's reformers and socialists, including Emma Goldman, John Reed, Louise Bryant, and Upton Sinclair. Her novels and plays are better understood in this context, aswell as the context of popular and regional writers, such as Zona Gale.
In 1922 Glaspell and Cook left their successful theatre behind so Cook could write and study in Delphi, Greece. Cook died there in 1924.
Glaspell returned to Provincetown.
 
She wrote a biography of her late husband, The Road to the Temple, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her 1931 play, Alison's House. In the 1930s, she lived again briefly in Chicago, where she served as Midwest Bureau Director for the Works Progress Administration's Federal Theatre Project.

Glaspell died in Provincetown in 1948. Though several of her novels were bestsellers, her popularity decreased after her death, and almost all of her novels are out of print (with the exception of "Fidelity" and "Brook Evans", recently reprinted by Persephone Books), but she is still highly regarded for her experimental plays and her widely anthologized short story "A Jury of Her Peers". The short story was adapted from her play Trifles, which depicts the true story of the murder of a farmer by his wife.

Susan Glaspell