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...