Her first novel, The Glory of the Conquered, appeared in 1909 and her first story collection, Lifted Masks, in 1912, but she would achieve her greatest fame as a playwright, culminating in a controversial Pulitzer Prize for Alison’s House (1930), inspired by the life of Emily Dickinson. From 1914 to 1921, she was a member of the Provincetown Players, a bohemian theatre-based community founded by her idealist husband George Cram Cook. Among the other members were Edna St. Vincent Millay, Djuna Barnes, Edna Ferber, John Reed, and the writer who would become the greatest American playwright of the time, Eugene O’Neill.

After early stories that were popular romances of the local-color school, Glaspell was influenced to adopt a more naturalistic approach, along with socialist political attitudes, by her husband and Floyd Dell. The rebellion of women against the domination of simple-minded males was a continuing subject. One of her plays, the one-act Trifles (1916), became the basis for her most famous story, “A Jury of Her Peers” (1917). There’s no denying this is a detective story — indeed, in the fashion of the time, one in which amateur sleuths are more perceptive than professionals — but it is a highly unconventional, one-of-a-kind detective story in which the detection is used to make a serious thematic point.

When Martha Hale opened the storm-door and got a cut of the north wind, she ran back for her big woolen scarf. As she hurriedly wound that round her head her eye made a scandalized sweep of her kitchen. It was no ordinary thing that called her away — it was probably further from ordinary than anything that had ever happened in Dickson County. But what her eye took in was that her kitchen was in no shape for leaving: her bread all ready for mixing, half the flour sifted and half unsifted.