Susan Glaspell was a bestselling novelist and a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. She was a founding member of the Provincetown Players, one of the most important collaboratives in the development of modern drama in the United States. She also served in the Works Progress Administration as Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project.

Her novels and plays are committed to developing deep, sympathetic characters, to understanding "life" in its complexity. Though realism was the medium of her fiction, she was also greatly interested in philosophy and religion. Many of her characters make principled stands.

As part of the Provincetown Players, she arranged for the first ever reading of a play by Eugene O'Neill.