Like so much else in his life, his heroic effort to finish his last novel came too late; and the luck which might have kept him alive until he had finished was not with him. He had predicted to Perkins in the middle of December that he could complete a first draft by January 15, and at the rate he was going he might have done so; on December 20 he completed the first episode of Chapter VI. The next day he had a second, fatal heart attack.
Unlike some of the literary great, who, in making themselves into cosmopolites, have travelled so far actually and figuratively from the place of their birth as to pass quite out of any connection with it, Susan Glaspell is still at heart a daughter of Iowa. The surroundings of her girlhood, it is evident, made an ineffaceable impression upon her memory. While some of the stories in Lifted Masks, her first volume, have a Chicago background, and at least one other, that of Paris, several have the settings that she knew so well while an undergraduate at Drake University, and a newspaper woman, covering the doings of the legislature. To her drama, The Inberitors, she has given a setting strongly suggestive of Davenport, with its references to Black Hawk, and to the steel works. The denominational college of the drama might well be a composite of several such Iowa institutions, while the radical professor, with his long-suppressed passion for Greece, must remind every reader of her late husband, George Cram Cook. Her general experience of rural life also served her in good stead in the composition of her powerful novel, Brook Evans.
This is a free excerpt of 278 words. There are 1,086 words (approx.
4 pages at 300 words per page) in the full critical essay.
Read the rest of this Criticism with our Susan Glaspell: Critical Essay by Bartholow V. Crawford Access Pass.
