Storyweb: Storytime For Grownups

This week on StoryWeb, Susan Glaspell’s play Trifles. Born in 1876, Susan Glaspell was a prominent novelist, short story writer, journalist, biographer, actress, and, most notably, playwright, winning the 1931 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for her play Alison’s House. She and her husband, George Cram Cook, founded the ground-breaking Provincetown Players, widely known as the first modern American theater company. In fact, it was Glaspell who discovered dramatist Eugene O’Neill as she was searching for a new playwright to feature at the theater. Though she was a widely acclaimed author during her lifetime, with pieces in Harper’s and Ladies’ Home Journal and with books on the New York Times bestsellers list, Glaspell is little known today. She comes down to us for two related works: her one-act play Trifles, written in 1916, and a short story based on the play, “A Jury of Her Peers,” written in 1917. The play and the story were based on Margaret Hossack’s murder trial, which Glaspell covered as a young reporter for