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.
During the years in which she was writing her short stories Susan Glaspell was also writing novels, and she published three between 1909 and 1915. In these longer works she moved beyond the restricted local-color tradition to the larger and more significant movement called "regionalism." The turn to the longer form of the novel meant that she would have to develop different techniques, more complicated plots, larger characters, and, most importantly, she would have to come to terms with her region, to move beyond the oversimplified attitude she held in most of her short stories. She had to see the Midwest as more than a locale, as more than a pleasant place where problems could be neatly resolved by a twist of fate and a happy ending. The novel demands that the writer create a world with all the attendant complexities, ambiguities, and elements of disorder that any region has. In other words, when she turned to the novel, Miss Glaspell had to enlarge her technique and her ideas.
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