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.
Susan Glaspell is best known today, if she is known at all, as one of the Provincetown Players, the little theater group active during the second decade of this century whose eagerness to stage original American dramas brought to light the talents of Eugene O'Neill. What is generally unknown today is that during this period, Glaspell shared the spotlight with O'Neill as one of the two most prolific and imaginative playwrights of the group. "In technique Susan Glaspell is undoubtedly the superior of Eugene O'Neill," wrote Andrew Malone in Dublin Magazine. Isaac Goldberg called her "one of the few Americans whose progress is worth watching with the same eyes that follow notable European effort.. ."The Drama of Transition, 1922. "If the Provincetown Players had done nothing more than to give us the delicately humorous and sensitive plays of Susan Glaspell they would have amply justified their existence," was critic John Corbin's verdict in his New York Times review of Bernice.
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