Susan Keating Glaspell (July 1, 1876 - July 28, 1948) was an American playwright, novelist, journalist and actress. With her husband George Cram Cook she founded the Provincetown Players, the first modern American theatre company. During the Great Depression, she served in the Works Progress Administration as Midwest Bureau Director of the Federal Theater Project. Glaspell is known to have composed nine novels, fifteen plays, over fifty short stories, and one biography.

Glaspell was highly regarded in her time, and was well known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. Her short stories were regularly printed in the era's top periodicals, and her New York Times obituary states that she was "one of the nation's most widely-read novelists." However, Glaspell's idealistic tales of strong and independent female protagonists were less popular in the post-war era that stressed female domesticity, and her novels fell out of print after her death.  In 1940 a new generation of influential Broadway-based critics began publishing derogatory reviews of her plays, having a sizable effect on her long-term standing. Exacerbating the issue was Glaspell's reluctance to seek publicity and her tendency to downplay her own accomplishments, perhaps a result of her modest Midwestern upbringing. Accordingly, in the United States her work was seriously neglected for many years. Internationally, she received some attention by scholars who were primarily interested in her more experimental work from the Provincetown years.  In the late 1970s feminist critics began to reevaluate Glaspell's career, and interest in her work has grown steadily ever since. Today, Glaspell scholarship is a "burgeoning" field, with several book-length biographies and analyses of her writing being published by university presses in recent years. After a century of being out of print, a large portion of her work has been republished. With major achievements in drama, novel, and short fiction, Glaspell is often cited as a "prime example" of an overlooked female writer deserving canonization. Perhaps the originator of modern American theater, Glaspell has been called "the First Lady of American Drama" and "the Mother of American Drama."  In 2003 the International Susan Glaspell Society was founded, with the aim of promoting "the recognition of Susan Glaspell as a major American dramatist and fiction writer." Her plays are frequently performed by college and university theater departments, but she has become more widely known for her often-anthologized works: the one-act play Trifles, and its short-story adaptation, "A Jury of Her Peers". Since the late 20th century, these two pieces have become staples of theatre and Women's Studies curricula across the United States and the world.

What else did she do?
Perhaps the originator of modern American theater, Glaspell has been called "the First Lady of American Drama" and "the Mother of American Drama."