Her America: “A Jury of Her Peers” and Other Stories
by Susan Glaspell edited by Patricia L. Bryan and Martha C. Carpentier
University of Iowa Press, 2010 Paper: 978-1-58729-864-6 | eISBN: 978-1-58729-924-7 Library of Congress Classification PS3513.L35H47 2010 Dewey Decimal Classification 813.52
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
One of the preeminent authors of the early twentieth century, Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) produced fourteen ground-breaking plays, nine novels, and more than fifty short stories. Her work was popular and critically acclaimed during her lifetime, with her novels appearing on best-seller lists and her stories published in major magazines and in The Best American Short Stories. Many of her short works display her remarkable abilities as a humorist, satirizing cultural conventions and the narrowness of small-town life. And yet they also evoke serious questions—relevant as much today as during Glaspell’s lifetime—about society’s values and priorities and about the individual search for self-fulfillment. While the classic “A Jury of Her Peers” has been widely anthologized in the last several decades, the other stories Glaspell wrote between 1915 and 1925 have not been available since their original appearance. This new collection reprints “A Jury of Her Peers”—restoring its original ending—and brings to light eleven other outstanding stories, offering modern readers the chance to appreciate the full range of Glaspell’s literary skills.
Glaspell was part of a generation of midwestern writers and artists, including Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who migrated first to Chicago and then east to New York. Like these other writers, she retained a deep love for and a deep ambivalence about her native region. She parodied its provincialism and narrow-mindedness, but she also celebrated its pioneering and agricultural traditions and its unpretentious values. Witty, gently humorous, satiric, provocative, and moving, the stories in this timely collection run the gamut from acerbic to laugh-out-loud funny to thought-provoking. In addition, at least five of them provide background to and thematic comparisons with Glaspell’s innovative plays that will be useful to dramatic teachers, students, and producers.
With its thoughtful introduction by two widely published Glaspell scholars, Her America marks an important contribution to the ongoing critical and scholarly efforts to return Glaspell to her former preeminence as a major writer. The universality and relevance of her work to political and social issues that continue to preoccupy American discourse—free speech, ethics, civic justice, immigration, adoption, and gender—establish her as a direct descendant of the American tradition of short fiction derived from Hawthorne, Poe, and Twain.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Patricia Bryan is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With Thomas Wolf, she is the author of Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America’s Heartland (Iowa paperback, 2007) and numerous articles on Susan Glaspell. Martha Carpentier is a professor of English at Seton Hall University. Cofounder and president of the Susan Glaspell Society, she is the author of The Major Novels of Susan Glaspell, coeditor of Disclosing Intertextualities: The Stories, Plays, and Novels of Susan Glaspell, and editor of Susan Glaspell: New Directions in Critical Inquiry.
REVIEWS
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Looking After Clara
The Manager of Crystal Sulphur Springs
Unveiling Brenda
A Jury of Her Peers
A Matter of Gesture
Poor Ed
Beloved Husband
The Busy Duck
Pollen
Government Goat
The Nervous Pig
A Rose in the Sand
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
Her America: “A Jury of Her Peers” and Other Stories
by Susan Glaspell edited by Patricia L. Bryan and Martha C. Carpentier
University of Iowa Press, 2010 Paper: 978-1-58729-864-6 eISBN: 978-1-58729-924-7
One of the preeminent authors of the early twentieth century, Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) produced fourteen ground-breaking plays, nine novels, and more than fifty short stories. Her work was popular and critically acclaimed during her lifetime, with her novels appearing on best-seller lists and her stories published in major magazines and in The Best American Short Stories. Many of her short works display her remarkable abilities as a humorist, satirizing cultural conventions and the narrowness of small-town life. And yet they also evoke serious questions—relevant as much today as during Glaspell’s lifetime—about society’s values and priorities and about the individual search for self-fulfillment. While the classic “A Jury of Her Peers” has been widely anthologized in the last several decades, the other stories Glaspell wrote between 1915 and 1925 have not been available since their original appearance. This new collection reprints “A Jury of Her Peers”—restoring its original ending—and brings to light eleven other outstanding stories, offering modern readers the chance to appreciate the full range of Glaspell’s literary skills.
Glaspell was part of a generation of midwestern writers and artists, including Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, and F. Scott Fitzgerald, who migrated first to Chicago and then east to New York. Like these other writers, she retained a deep love for and a deep ambivalence about her native region. She parodied its provincialism and narrow-mindedness, but she also celebrated its pioneering and agricultural traditions and its unpretentious values. Witty, gently humorous, satiric, provocative, and moving, the stories in this timely collection run the gamut from acerbic to laugh-out-loud funny to thought-provoking. In addition, at least five of them provide background to and thematic comparisons with Glaspell’s innovative plays that will be useful to dramatic teachers, students, and producers.
With its thoughtful introduction by two widely published Glaspell scholars, Her America marks an important contribution to the ongoing critical and scholarly efforts to return Glaspell to her former preeminence as a major writer. The universality and relevance of her work to political and social issues that continue to preoccupy American discourse—free speech, ethics, civic justice, immigration, adoption, and gender—establish her as a direct descendant of the American tradition of short fiction derived from Hawthorne, Poe, and Twain.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
Patricia Bryan is a professor of law at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. With Thomas Wolf, she is the author of Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America’s Heartland (Iowa paperback, 2007) and numerous articles on Susan Glaspell. Martha Carpentier is a professor of English at Seton Hall University. Cofounder and president of the Susan Glaspell Society, she is the author of The Major Novels of Susan Glaspell, coeditor of Disclosing Intertextualities: The Stories, Plays, and Novels of Susan Glaspell, and editor of Susan Glaspell: New Directions in Critical Inquiry.
REVIEWS
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Looking After Clara
The Manager of Crystal Sulphur Springs
Unveiling Brenda
A Jury of Her Peers
A Matter of Gesture
Poor Ed
Beloved Husband
The Busy Duck
Pollen
Government Goat
The Nervous Pig
A Rose in the Sand
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE