The International Susan Glaspell Society was formed in 2003 with the stated mission of “broadening the recognition of Susan Glaspell as a major American dramatist and fiction writer though production of high-quality scholarship and critical analyses of all her works, participation in national and international conferences, performances, and public readings of her plays, and the commitment to reprinting and teaching her plays, stories, and novels.” Since then many conference panels have been presented nationally and internationally, many performances and readings of Glaspell’s plays have been staged, and many ground-breaking books have been published by a core group of dedicated Susan Glaspell and Provincetown Players scholars. This new collection, Susan Glaspell in Context, released by Cambridge University Press in July 2023, represents the culmination of these 20-years of scholarly excellence and commitment.

Edited and inspired by J. Ellen Gainor, author of Susan Glaspell in Context: American Theater, Culture, and Politics 1915-48, and co-editor with Linda Ben-Zvi of The Complete Plays, this collection provides new, accessible, and informative essays by all of the leading international scholars and artists about Susan Glaspell’s life, career development, writing, and ongoing global creative impact. The collection features wide-ranging discussions of Glaspell’s fiction, plays, and non-fiction in historical and contemporary critical contexts, including sections on Glaspell’s early Midwestern background, her place as a woman in American journalism, her involvement in the Chicago Renaissance as well as Bohemian Greenwich Village, her roles in the Provincetown Players and the Little Theater Movement, and her signal contributions to Modernism both fictional and dramatic. The volume also includes the first analyses of six previously unknown Glaspell short stories, as well as interviews with contemporary stage and film artists who have produced Glaspell’s works or adapted them for audiences worldwide. Organized around key locations, influences, and phases in Glaspell’s career, as well as core methodological and pedagogical approaches to her work, the collection’s thirty-one essays place Glaspell in historical, geographical, political, cultural, and creative contexts of value to students, scholars, teachers, and artists alike.

Many heartfelt thanks to Ellen from all of us at ISGS for her leadership and indefatigable commitment to our mission.

ISBN 9781108767309

To order: Susan Glaspell in Context (cambridge.org)