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as we know it

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1. Feelings of disillusionment.
2. Common subjects: slums of rapidly growing cities, factories replacing farmlands, poor factory workers, corrupt politicians.
3. Represented the manner and environment of everyday life and ordinary people as realistically as possible (Regionalism).
4. Sought to explain behavior (psychologically/socially).hem

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1)Mark Twain
-Huckleberry Finn
2)Jack London
-Call of the Wild
-"To Build a Fire"
3)Stephen Crane
-"The Open Boat"
4)Ambrose Bierce
-"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"
5)Kate Chopin
-"Story of an Hour"
-The Awakening

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Realism is thought to mark the beginning of modern art, rejecting the traditional elements that had formerly shaped artworks.

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Realism Art - A History of Realism and the Realism Art Movement

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Realism art is an artistic movement that began in the 19th century in France, as a result of the great social changes sparked by the Industrial Revolution. This

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Realism showed what social, economic, political, and cultural life was like in the middle of the 19th century. It didn't shy away from the "ugly" and unpleasant moments of daily life.

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Summary of Realism

Though never a coherent group, Realism is recognized as the first modern movement in art, which rejected traditional forms of art, literature, and social organization as outmoded in the wake of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. Beginning in France in the 1840s, Realism revolutionized painting, expanding conceptions of what constituted art. Working in a chaotic era marked by revolution and widespread social change, Realist painters replaced the idealistic images and literary conceits of traditional art with real-life events, giving the margins of society similar weight to grand history paintings and allegories. Their choice to bring everyday life into their canvases was an early manifestation of the avant-garde desire to merge art and life, and their rejection of pictorial techniques, like perspective, prefigured the many 20 th-century definitions and redefinitions of modernism.

Key Ideas & Accomplishments

Realism is broadly considered the beginning of modern art. Literally, this is due to its conviction that everyday life and the modern world were suitable subjects for art. Philosophically, Realism embraced the progressive aims of modernism, seeking new truths through the reexamination and overturning of traditional systems of values and beliefs.

Realism concerned itself with how life was structured socially, economically, politically, and culturally in the mid-19th century. This led to unflinching, sometimes "ugly" portrayals of life's unpleasant moments and the use of dark, earthy palettes that confronted high art's ultimate ideals of beauty.

Realism was the first explicitly anti-institutional, nonconformist art movement. Realist painters took aim at the social mores and values of the bourgeoisie and monarchy upon who patronized the art market. Though they continued submitting works to the Salons of the official Academy of Art, they were not above mounting independent exhibitions to defiantly show their work.

Following the explosion of newspaper printing and mass media in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, Realism brought in a new conception of the artist as self-publicist. Gustave Courbet, Édouard Manet, and others purposefully courted controversy and used the media to enhance their celebrity in a manner that continues among artists to this day.

Overview of Realism

Artworks and Artists of Realism

Artist: Gustave Courbet

Artist: Jean-François Millet

Artist: James Whistler

Artist: Jules Breton

Beginnings of Realism

Before Realism: History Painting and the Academy

Established in 1648 by Louis XIV, the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture or Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture governed the production of art in France for nearly two centuries. Given France's prominence in European culture during that time, the Academy set standards for art across the continent, providing studio training for young talent and recognizing artistic achievement at its semi-regular Salon exhibitions.

The "highest" form of art, established by the Academy in a 1668 conference, was history painting: the large-scale depiction of a narrative, typically drawn from classical mythology, the Bible, literature, or the annals of human achievement. Only the strongest painters were allowed to paint in this genre, and their works were the most celebrated by the Academy. Descending in importance in the hierarchy of genres were portraiture (the depiction of important persons), genre scenes (the depiction of peasants, or "unimportant" persons), landscape (the depiction of living nature), and still life ( nature morte, or "dead nature").

Spurred by archaeological discoveries in Greece and Italy in the mid-18 th century and Enlightenment ideals of reason and order, Neoclassicism became the mode par excellence for history painting in the late 1700s. Neoclassical history painting, exemplified in the work of Jacques-Louis David, used classical references, compositional techniques, and settings to comment upon contemporary events. His famous Oath of the Horatii (1784), for example, communicated the civic value of patriotism in the guise of a story from the Roman historian Livy.

In response to Neoclassicism, the Industrial Revolution, and the Enlightenment's rationalization of life and society, Romanticism embraced irrational, intense emotion and exotic subject matter as more authentic sources for artistic creativity. Rather than beautifully ordered outdoor scenes, Romantic landscapes became arenas for the sublime conflict between man and nature. In place of David's praise of civic virtue were history paintings like Eugène Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus (1827): a turbulent, chaotic scene inspired by a Lord Byron play wherein the titular king of Assyria commands his possessions destroyed and his terrified, beseeching wives massacred in the face of final military defeat.

Revolution, the Rejection of Tradition, and the Importance of Photography

While Romanticism might have rejected certain tenets of Neoclassicism, it did not drastically change the 17 th- and 18 th-century institutions of art and society. The near-perpetual state of revolution in France in the 19 th century provided an impetus to enact a more radical change. After the initial 1789 Revolution, France went through the First Republic, the First Empire under Napoleon Bonaparte, the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy, the 1830 Revolution, the July Monarchy, the 1848 Revolution, the Second Republic, the Second Empire, the Franco-Prussian War and institution of the Paris Commune of 1871, and the establishment of the Third Republic.

Challenging Neoclassicism and Romanticism as escapist in the face of the larger societal issues brought by the turbulent 19 th century, Realism began in France in the 1840s as the cultural aspect of a larger response to ever-changing governance, military occupation and economic exploitation of the colonies, and industrialization and urbanization in the cities. Realism, more than the simple representation of nature, was an attempt to situate oneself in the "real": in scientific, moral, and political certainty.

In the 1830s, this push toward scientific positivism manifested itself in the advent of photography. Louis Daguerre publicly demonstrated the daguerreotype in 1839, mechanically fixing an image from nature onto a metal support by the use of a camera. Simultaneously in England, William Henry Fox Talbot accomplished the same with the calotype, which fixed the image onto paper coated with silver iodide. In turn, the photograph fueled Realism. While Realist artists rarely worked from photographs (some did), the photograph's biggest conceptual strength was its claim to veracity. If the right to rule had traditionally been supported by art that idealized the powerful, the photograph suggested the possibility to literally show rulers' real flaws. In the midst of a revolutionary century, Realist painters sought to adapt photography's truth value to their art.

Honoré Daumier and an Art of Social Critique

Another major influence on Realism was the explosion of socially critical journalism and caricature at the beginning of the July Monarchy (1830-48). Though the authoritarian reign of Louis Phillippe I would end in overthrow, the first five years of his rule allowed greater freedom of the press. It was in this moment that Honoré Daumier began publishing caricatures critical of the monarchy, such as the lithograph Gargantua (1831), in which he mockingly depicted the king as the gluttonous giant of François Rabelais's 1534 novel.

Engraving, which could be reproduced and disseminated in the press, enabled Daumier to circulate his critical compositions. Despite being imprisoned for six months for his negative depiction of the king as Gargantua, he continued to create the Realist lithograph Rue Transnonain, le 15 Avril 1834 (1834), which showed the brutal aftermath of a massacre of working-class innocents by the French government. The work was considered so powerful and dangerous to the monarchy that Louis-Philippe sent men to purchase as many copies as possible to be destroyed. Daumier would continue painting and engraving for several decades, producing socially focused works such as Third-Class Carriage (1862-64).

Gustave Courbet, the Revolutions of 1848, and the Origins of Socialism

When the July Monarchy came crashing down in France in 1848, ushering in the Second Republic (1848-51), it was as part of a larger wave of European revolution that brought wide-ranging social changes in Germany, Italy, the Austrian Empire, the Netherlands, and Poland. These events, combined with the publication of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's The Philosophy of Poverty in 1846 and Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto in 1848, cast a new light on the margins of society, and Realism became the visual language for their representation.

A friend of Proudhon and Realism's main proponent, Gustave Courbet led a multifaceted assault on French political power, bourgeois social mores, and the art institution. His exhibition of A Burial at Ornans (1849-50) at the Salon of 1850-51 marked the debut of Realism as a significant force in the European art scene, causing a scandal with its matter-of-fact depiction of a rural funeral on a scale traditionally reserved for allegory and history painting. The Stone Breakers (1849-50), exhibited in the same year, represented two anonymous, lower-class workers participating in poorly compensated, backbreaking labor, a scene that carried uncomfortable associations with Socialism for the Salon's middle-class audience. Young Ladies on the Banks of the Seine (Summer) (1856) caused a similar sensation at the Salon of 1857 with a frank depiction of two prostitutes lazily reclining on a riverbank with their garments in disarray that offended bourgeois taste.

Realism: Concepts, Styles, and Trends

Challenging the Norm and Courting Scandal: Courbet and Manet

If in the 1850s Courbet painted large works with subject matter that questioned the values of French society, Édouard Manet pushed Realism even further in the 1860s. Having made a name for himself at the Salon of 1861 with his exhibition of The Spanish Singer (1860), he submitted Le déjeuner sur l'herbe (1863) to the Salon of 1863. Though the painting was rejected, it was shown in the Salon des Refusés ("Exhibition of Rejects"). There, Manet's frank depiction of two young dandies dining in a forest with a fully nude woman offended the sensibilities of its salon-going audience, especially middle-class men who participated in exactly those sorts of dalliances with Parisian prostitutes and who did not like to be reminded of this when out at art exhibitions, potentially with their families. Manet built upon and fed into all of these scandalous charges when he submitted Olympia (1863) to the Salon of 1865. Olympia, which places the viewer in the position of a bordello visitor attempting to procure a disinterested prostitute, made Manet's intervention even more obvious.

The critics, however, were playing directly into Courbet's and Manet's hands: the notoriety they commanded from their works was intentional, turning them into celebrities within the art world. Beside muddying the traditional categories and subjects of academic painting, Courbet, and Manet in his turn, would challenge the state art institution itself. When three of his fourteen submissions to the Exposition Universelle of 1855 were rejected for size considerations, Courbet rented space adjacent to the Exposition to construct his own Pavilion of Realism, in which he housed forty of his own works for free public view. When Manet was excluded from the Exposition Universelle of 1867, he too exhibited independently. Beyond drawing attention away from government exhibitions and creating publicity for their work, Courbet's and Manet's interventions emboldened future artists (most notably the Impressionists of the following generation) to exhibit their art independently.

Realism's Visual Revolution

While the Realist painters' manipulation of controversy through their subject matter is an obvious manifestation of their anti-authoritarian goals, their technical innovations may be less obvious to eyes conditioned by 150 years of modern art. At the time, however, the artistic distance between a canvas by Courbet and a traditional history painting were obvious and confrontational.

When Courbet debuted The Stone Breakers, critics accused him of purposeful ugliness and complained of the "flatness" of his composition, which was enhanced by the bold outlines surrounding his two key figures. A year later, his painting Young Ladies of the Village (1851-52) was attacked as clumsy, lacking in correct perspective, and disregarding scale in its portrayal of a trio of women who dwarf the cattle that stand near them. Eleven years later, Manet's painting Le déjeuner sur l'herbe was attacked on nearly the same grounds, with critics commenting negatively on Manet's coarseness of paint handling, the flatness of his composition, and the stark, contoured whiteness of his female figure. When critics correctly connected Manet's composition of the three-person figural group to High Renaissance works by Marcantonio Raimondi and Giorgione, their outrage heightened at his indecorous treatment of the Old Masters.

The follow-up exhibition of Olympia (coarser, flatter, more starkly contoured, and based on Titian's Venus of Urbino (1538)) proved that these manipulations to traditional academic painting were not the mistakes of a young, clumsy artist. Unwittingly, the critics had stumbled onto what would become the groundbreaking visual achievement of Realism: Courbet and Manet each made an artistic choice to move away from the Renaissance conception of a canvas as a "window onto the world" toward a flatness that revealed the canvas as a two-dimensional support to be creatively covered with pigment. This first step away from painting as a mere representational format was a crucible for generations of modern artists and a major reason for the continued popularity of Realism today. While Courbet was outspoken in his conviction that art could never be wholly abstract, his and Manet's nontraditional painting empowered future artists to move further away from the direct pursuit of naturalism.

The Ennobled Peasant: Jean-François Millet, Rosa Bonheur and Jules Breton

Despite Courbet's insistence that socialism informed his Realist painting, not every Realist artist pursued his political goals. They did, however, share an interest in the life of the lower class and desire to represent it in high art. Jean-François Millet completed a trio of works, The Sower (1850), The Gleaners (1857), and The Angelus (1857-59), that represented the hard work of the rural peasant class with dignity, but with a less confrontational air than Courbet's canvases. The female painter Rosa Bonheur, whose progressive-minded parents allowed her to study animal anatomy in barns and slaughterhouses at a young age (while dressed as a boy!), first achieved fame for Plowing in the Nivernais (1848), a government-commissioned painting that depicts four farmhands driving steer to plow a field. As it was thought to reference a scene from George Sand's La Mare au Diable, this early example of Realism was spared the criticism cast on Courbet's large works. The Horse Fair (1852-55) further demonstrated her focus on blue-collar work and her ability to create dynamic compositions through close observation.

However, even Millet's seemingly innocuous celebration of France's rural backbone was received as potentially dangerous socialist content by conservative critics in the wake of the 1848 Revolution, which granted greater rights to provincial men. Jules Breton's paintings were considered a safer alternative, and has been referred to as "popular Realism." Breton's The Gleaners (1854) depicts the same practice as Millet's painting, wherein poor rural women are allowed to pick up bits of grain left behind after the harvest. However, Breton imagined the scene as one happening within a strict order: despite gleaning being "women's work," a man with a dog dominates the scene, overseeing the fieldwork. A steeple on the horizon would have communicated both the pious nature and Christian values of the peasantry as well as another form of governance to Parisians concerned about the growing equality they shared with their rural counterparts.

Realism Outside of France

Though Realism was first a French phenomenon, it obtained adherents across Europe and in the United States. The American James Abbott McNeill Whistler befriended Courbet in the 1860s and painted in a Realist style. Yet Whistler was an advocate for "art for art's sake" and rejected the idea of painting as a moral or social enterprise a la Courbet. Nonetheless, his Symphony in White, no. 1: the White Girl caused controversy at the same Salon of 1863 where Manet courted scandal, because critics argued that it contained connotations of a bride's lost innocence.

Thomas Eakins became the United States' most prominent Realist painter, integrating photographic study into his works and revealing the character of his subjects through close observation. The Gross Clinic (1875), a portrait of the doctor Samuel Gross performing invasive surgery in an operating theater is rendered in unflinching detail. His choice of a contemporary subject (modern surgery) follows the Realist belief that an artist must be of his own time.

The German Realist Wilhelm Leibl met Courbet and saw his work when the French painter visited Germany in 1869. Recognizing his abilities, Courbet lured him back to Paris, where Leibl achieved considerable success, also meeting Manet before returning to Munich to establish himself as his country's premier Realist painter. He is best known for his images of peasant scenes such as Three Women in Church (1881), which brought the frank naturalism of the Dutch and German Old Masters into the modern era. Though the somewhat dated outfits that the three women wear indicate their low economic status (the new trends of the city have passed them by), Leibl ennobles them in their patience and humility.

The Realist Ilya Repin was the most prominent painter of his country in the 19 th century, responsible for bringing Russian visual art to the attention of European audiences. His large canvas Barge Haulers on the Volga (1870-73) celebrated the strength of Russia's lowest-ranking physical laborers. The novelist Leo Tolstoy would write of Repin that he depicted "the life of the people much better than any other Russian artist." Having traveled to Paris and become aware of the nascent movement of Impressionism, Repin chose to continue painting in a Realist vein, because he felt that Impressionist painting lacked the social motivations necessary to modern art.

Realism in Literature

The Realist painting movement ran parallel to the Realist movement in literature, exemplified in the work of writers like Honore de Balzac, Champfleury, and Emile Zola. Realist authors recognized in the artistic movement the shared desire to divorce from tradition and celebrated it, contributing to its success. Balzac's witty and incisive representation of society in the early-19 th century contrasted with the emotional grandeur of his Romantic counterparts much as Courbet's painting would in the visual arts.

Champfleury promoted Courbet's work as early as 1848, continuing to do so for decades, and Courbet painted him among his supporters in the 1855 masterwork The Painter's Studio (1854-55). Of Courbet's Pavilion of Realism, Champfleury wrote: "It is an incredibly audacious act, it is the subversion of all institutions associated with the jury, it is a direct appeal to the public, some are saying it is freedom."

Zola was one of Manet's earliest and most devoted defenders, recognizing his importance to modern art and declaring him a master of the future. By 1868, Zola could write: "I don't need to plead for modern subjects here. This cause was won a long time ago. After those remarkable works by Manet and Courbet, no one would dare now say that the present day is unworthy of being painted."

Later Developments - After Realism

There was no defined "group" in Realism, as we might conceive of the later Impressionists as a coherent group who exhibited together: the Realist movement comprised of a number of artists working independently among similar lines. Though they knew each other, and the artists and writers were mutually supportive friends, there was no "breakup" or dissolution of the group. Thus, the historical and artistic motives that led to Realism's genesis and development continued in the art and ethos of painters across the globe for generations to come.

As the enfants terribles of the 19 th-century art world, Courbet and Manet are often invoked as the first avant-garde artists, and their mixture of art and critique laid groundwork for every socially engaged artist in their wake. Moreover, their visual trajectory into flatness had widespread ramifications for painting without which Manet's next step into Impressionism could not have happened. Their use of contour lines to structure form and separate it into panes of color were also an inspiration to the Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne and his followers, as well as the Cubists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque.

Even artists with drastically different goals than Realism named their debt to the movement. Giorgio de Chirico, the head of the Metaphysical Painting movement, wrote about his reverence for Courbet, who he acknowledged as an artistic father figure. Surrealism founder André Breton would celebrate Courbet's mixing of the artistic with the political; Surrealist dissident Georges Bataille named Manet the father of modern art for being the first to "destroy" the subject of painting, in Olympia.

The Ashcan School of the late-19 th and early-20 th century in the U.S. derived from the sometimes gritty, matter-of-fact depiction of city life was partially based on the figurative language and social awareness of Realism. Similarly, Social Realism, less an art movement than a cultural phenomenon, took Realism's relation to social justice as a given and made figurative works to combat the abstract art in vogue in the early part of the century. The Mexican muralists, American art workers in Depression-era New Deal programs, and French and German painters in the years leading up to World War II worked in this mode to create straightforward, legible works to transmit messages to their audiences. Social Realism should not be confused with Socialist Realism, decreed by Joseph Stalin as the state art of the Soviet Union in 1934. Though both shared a commitment to the education and edification of a lower-class, uneducated populace, the Soviet variant - a visual mélange of Repin's Realism and a sunnier Impressionism - became an official, academic art, supporting the regime and remaining largely unchanged until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

In Weimar Germany (1918-33), the artists of Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) took lessons from the matter-of-factness of Leibl's Realist canvases to move beyond the distortions and abstraction of German Expressionism. Photorealism in the 1960s was born of a similar relationship to Abstract Expressionism, and though its artists did not always share the social motivations of Realism (preferring to link themselves to the example of contemporary Pop art, also a figurative language), their debt to the movement is visually apparent.

Useful Resources on Realism

Similar Art

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Born in a chaotic era marked by revolution and social change, Realism revolutionized painting, expanding conceptions of art. Manet, Courbet, Whistler, Millet+

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1)Civil War
1861-1865
2)Reconstruction Era
1865-1877

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When she was 15 she married John Henry Koontz- the first of four husbands.

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Her first book, Flowering Judas, was published in 1930 by Harcourt Brace.

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Katherine is said to have had a light, feathery voice.

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The Victorian house in which Katherine Anne Porter lived was narrow and white, reached by an iron-railed stairway curving up from the shady brick-walked Georgetown street. The parlor to which a maid admitted the caller was an elegant mélange of several aspects of the past, both American and European. Dim and cool after the midsummer glare, the high-ceilinged room was dominated by a bottle-green settee from the period of Napoleon III. Outside the alcove of windows there was a rustle of wind through ginkgo trees, then a hush.

Finally, a voice in the upper hallway: its tone that of someone talking to a bird, or coquetting with an old beau-light and feathery, with a slight flutter. A few moments later, moving as lightly as her voice, Miss Porter hurried through the wide doorway, unexpectedly modern in a soft green suit of woven Italian silk. Small and elegant, she explained her tardiness, related an anecdote from the morning's mail, offered a minted iced tea, and speculated aloud on where we might best conduct our conversation.

She decided on the dining room, a quiet, austere place overlooking the small enclosed garden. Here the aspect was a different one. "I want to live in a world capital or the howling wilderness," she said once, and did. The drawing room was filled with pieces that had once been part of the house on the rue Notre Dame des Champs; this one was bright with Mexican folk art-whistles and toy animals collected during a recent tour for the Department of State-against simpler, heavier pieces of furniture. The round table at which we sat was of Vermont marble, mottled and colored like milk glass, on a wrought-iron base of her own design. There was a sixteenth-century cupboard from Ávila, and a refectory table of the early Renaissance from a convent in Fiesole. Here we settled the tape recorder, under an image of the great god Horus.

We tried to make a beginning. She was an experienced lecturer, familiar with microphone and tape recorder, but now she was to talk about herself as well as her work, the link between, and the inexorable winding of the tape from one spool to the other acted almost as a hypnotic. Finally we turned it off and talked for a while of other things, more frivolous and more autobiographical, hoping to surprise an easier revelation ...

INTERVIEWER

You were saying that you had never intended to make a career of writing.

KATHERINE ANNE PORTER

I've never made a career of anything, you know, not even of writing. I started out with nothing in the world but a kind of passion, a driving desire. I don't know where it came from, and I don't know why-or why I have been so stubborn about it that nothing could deflect me. But this thing between me and my writing is the strongest bond I have ever had-stronger than any bond or any engagement with any human being or with any other work I've ever done. I really started writing when I was six or seven years old. But I had such a multiplicity of half-talents, too: I wanted to dance, I wanted to play the piano, I sang, I drew. It wasn't really dabbling-I was investigating everything, experimenting in everything. And then, for one thing, there weren't very many amusements in those days. If you wanted music, you had to play the piano and sing yourself. Oh, we saw all the great things that came during the season, but after all, there would only be a dozen or so of those occasions a year. The rest of the time we depended upon our own resources: our own music and books. All the old houses that I knew when I was a child were full of books, bought generation after generation by members of the family. Everyone was literate as a matter of course. Nobody told you to read this or not to read that. It was there to read, and we read.

INTERVIEWER

Which books influenced you most?

PORTER

That's hard to say, because I grew up in a sort of mélange. I was reading Shakespeare's sonnets when I was thirteen years old, and I'm perfectly certain that they made the most profound impression upon me of anything I ever read. For a time I knew the whole sequence by heart; now I can only remember two or three of them. That was the turning point of my life, when I read the Shakespeare sonnets, and then all at one blow, all of Dante-in that great big book illustrated by Gustave Doré. The plays I saw on the stage, but I don't remember reading them with any interest at all. Oh, and I read all kinds of poetry-Homer, Ronsard, all the old French poets in translation. We also had a very good library of-well, you might say secular philosophers. I was incredibly influenced by Montaigne when I was very young. And one day when I was about fourteen, my father led me up to a great big line of books and said, "Why don't you read this? It'll knock some of the nonsense out of you!" It happened to be the entire set of Voltaire's philosophical dictionary with notes by Smollett. And I plowed through it; it took me about five years.

And of course we read all the eighteenth-century novelists, though Jane Austen, like Turgenev, didn't really engage me until I was quite mature. I read them both when I was very young, but I was grown up before I really took them in. And I discovered for myself Wuthering Heights; I think I read that book every year of my life for fifteen years. I simply adored it. Henry James and Thomas Hardy were really my introduction to modern literature; Grandmother didn't much approve of it. She thought Dickens might do, but she was a little against Mr. Thackeray; she thought he was too trivial. So that was as far as I got into the modern world until I left home!

INTERVIEWER

Don't you think this background-the comparative isolation of Southern rural life and the atmosphere of literary interest-helped to shape you as a writer?

PORTER

I think it's something in the blood. We've always had great letter writers, readers, great storytellers in our family. I've listened all my life to articulate people. They were all great storytellers, and every story had shape and meaning and point.

INTERVIEWER

Were any of them known as writers?

PORTER

Well, there was my sixth or seventh cousin once removed, poor William Sidney. O. Henry, you know. He was my father's second cousin-I don't know what that makes him to me. And he was more known in the family for being a bank robber. He worked in a bank, you know, and he just didn't seem to find a talent for making money; no Porter ever did. But he had a wife who was dying of TB and he couldn't keep up with the doctor's bills. So he took a pitiful little sum-oh, about three hundred and fifty dollars-and ran away when he was accused. But he came back, because his wife was dying, and went to prison. And there was Horace Porter, who spent his whole eight years as ambassador to France looking for the bones of John Paul Jones. And when he found them, and brought them back, he wrote a book about them.

INTERVIEWER

It seems to me that your work is pervaded by a sense of history. Is that part of the family legacy?

PORTER

We were brought up with a sense of our own history, you know. My mother's family came to this country in 1648 and went to the John Randolph territory of Virginia. And one of my great-great-grandfathers was Jonathan Boone, the brother of Daniel. On my father's side I'm descended from Colonel Andrew Porter, whose father came to Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, in 1720. He was one of the circle of George Washington during the Revolution, a friend of Lafayette, and one of the founders of the Society of the Cincinnati-oh, he really took it seriously!-and when he died in 1809-well, just a few years before that he was offered the post of secretary of war, but he declined. We were never very ambitious people. We never had a president, though we had two governors and some in the army and the navy. I suppose we did have a desire to excel but not to push our way to higher places. We thought we'd already arrived!

INTERVIEWER

The "we" of family is very strong, isn't it? I remember that you once wrote of the ties of blood as the "absolute point of all departure and return." And the central character in many of your stories is defined, is defining herself often, in relation to a family organization. Even the measure of time is human-expressed in terms of the very old and the very young, and how much of human experience they have absorbed.

PORTER

Yes, but it wasn't a conscious made-up affair, you know. In those days you belonged together, you lived together, because you were a family. The head of our house was a grandmother, an old matriarch, you know, and a really lovely and beautiful woman, a good soul, and so she didn't do us any harm. But the point is that we did live like that, with Grandmother's friends, all reverend old gentlemen with frock coats, and old ladies with jet breastplates. Then there were the younger people, the beautiful girls and the handsome young boys, who were all ahead of me; when I was a little girl, eight or nine years old, they were eighteen to twenty-two, and they represented all glamour, all beauty, all joy and freedom to me. Then there was my own age, and then there were the babies. And the servants, the Negroes. We simply lived that way; to have four generations in one house, under one roof, there was nothing unusual about that. That was just my experience, and this is just the way I've reacted to it. Many other people didn't react, who were brought up in very much the same way.

I remember when I was very young, my older sister wanted to buy some old furniture. It was in Louisiana, and she had just been married. And I went with her to a wonderful old house in the country where we'd been told there was a very old gentleman who probably had some things to sell. His wife had died, and he was living there alone. So we went to this lovely old house, and, sure enough, there was this lonely beautiful old man, eighty-seven or -eight, surrounded by devoted Negro servants. But his wife was dead and his children were married and gone. He said, yes, he had a few things he wanted to sell. So he showed us through the house. And finally he opened a door, and showed us a bedroom with a beautiful four-poster bed, with a wonderful satin coverlet: the most wonderful, classical-looking bed you ever saw. And my sister said, "Oh, that's what I want." And he said, "Oh, madame, that is my marriage bed. That is the bed that my wife brought with her as a bride. We slept together in that bed for nearly sixty years. All our children were born there. Oh," he said, "I shall die in that bed, and then they can dispose of it as they like."

I remember that I felt a little suffocated and frightened. I felt a little trapped. But why? Only because I understood that. I was brought up in that. And I was at the age of rebellion then, and it really scared me. But I look back on it now and think how perfectly wonderful, what a tremendously beautiful life it was. Everything in it had meaning.

INTERVIEWER

But it seems to me that your work suggests someone who was searching for new-perhaps broader-meanings ... that while you've retained the South of your childhood as a point of reference, you've ranged far from that environment itself. You seem to have felt little of the peculiarly Southern preoccupation with racial guilt and the death of the old agrarian life.

PORTER

I'm a Southerner by tradition and inheritance, and I have a very profound feeling for the South. And, of course, I belong to the guilt-ridden white-pillar crowd myself, but it just didn't rub off on me. Maybe I'm just not Jewish enough, or Puritan enough, to feel that the sins of the father are visited on the third and fourth generations. Or maybe it's because of my European influences-in Texas and Louisiana. The Europeans didn't have slaves themselves as late as my family did, but they still thought slavery was quite natural... . But, you know, I was always restless, always a roving spirit. When I was a little child I was always running away. I never got very far, but they were always having to come and fetch me. Once when I was about six, my father came to get me somewhere I'd gone, and he told me later he'd asked me, "Why are you so restless? Why can't you stay here with us?" and I said to him, "I want to go and see the world. I want to know the world like the palm of my hand."

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The Victorian house in which Katherine Anne Porter lived was narrow and white, reached by an iron-railed stairway curving up from the shady brick-walked Georgetown street. The parlor to which a maid admitted the caller was an elegant mélange of several aspects of the past, both American and E...

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Over fifty short tales, nine novels, fifteen plays, and one biography have been written by Susan Glaspell.

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Graduated from Des Moines' Drake University in 1899 and got a  job as a journalist there

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Susan Glaspell, the daughter of Elmer Glaspell and Alice Keating, was born in Davenport, Iowa on 1st July 1876. She graduated from Drake University in Des Moines in 1899 and found work as a journalist with the Des Moines Daily News.

On 2nd December, 1900, John Hossack was murdered with an axe as he slept. His 57-year old wife, Margaret, was charged with the killing. Glaspell covered the trial for her newspaper. The jury did not believe her story that she slept through the killing, even though she lay next to her husband as he was murdered and she was found guilty.

According to the authors of Midnight Assassin: A Murder in America's Heartland: "Although Glaspell had little exposure to criminal law, she initially approached the case like a detective; she personally investigated the murder, visiting the Hossack farmhouse, interviewing the attorneys, and studying the inquest testimony... The case made an indelible impression on Glaspell."

Glaspell's first novel, The Glory of the Conquered, was published in 1909. It received a series of impressive reviews. The New York Times critic argued: "Unless Susan Glaspell is an assumed name covering that of some already well-known author - and the book has qualities so out of the ordinary in American fiction and so individual that this does not seem likely - The Glory of the Conquered brings forward a new author of fine and notable gifts."

Soon afterwards she met two other writers from the town, Floyd Dell and George Jig Cook. Dell later wrote: "Susan was a slight, gentle, sweet, whimsically humourous girl, a little ethereal in appearance, but evidently a person of great energy, and brimful of talent; but, we agreed, too medieval-romantic in her views of life." Barbara Gelb added that she was a "delicate, sad-eyed, witty woman." A journalist who worked with her on the Des Moines Daily News described her as "a strikingly handsome young lady with a nobility of character and charm of manner that command more than passing attention."

Glaspell next novel was She published the (1911) and the following year had a collection of short-stories, Lifted Masks, published. During this period she began living with George Jig Cook. The couple moved to Provincetown, a small seaport in Massachusetts. They joined a group of left-wing writers including Floyd Dell, John Reed, Mary Heaton Vorse, Mabel Dodge, Hutchins Hapgood, Neith Boyce and Louise Bryant.

In 1915 several members of the group established the Provincetown Theatre Group. A shack at the end of the fisherman's wharf was turned into a theatre. Later, other writers such as Eugene O'Neill and Edna St. Vincent Millay joined the group. The play, Suppressed Desires, that she co-wrote with his husband George Jig Cook, was one of the first plays performed by the group.

As Barbara Gelb, the author of So Short a Time (1973), has pointed out: "Cook and Susan Glaspell had participated, along with Reed, in the birth of the Washington Square Players in Greenwich Village and had written a one-act play to help launch a summer theater in Provincetown in 1915. Cook dreamed of creating a theater that would express fresh, new American talent, and after his modest beginning in the summer of 1915, began urging his friends to provide scripts for an expanded program for the summer of 1916. None of his friends were professional playwrights, but several, like Reed, were journalists and short-story writers. Their unfamiliarity with the dramatic form was, in Cook's opinion, precisely what suited them to be pioneers in his new theater and to break up some of the old theater molds; Cook wanted them to disregard the rules and precepts of the commercial Broadway theater, and to stumble and blunder and grope their way toward a native dramatic art."

Glaspell also wrote Trifles (1916), a play based on the John Hossack case, for the group. It has been argued that the play is an example of early feminist drama. Heywood Broun was one of those who saw the significance of the play: "No direct statements are made for the benefit of the audience. Like the women, they must piece out the story by inference... The story is brought to mind vividly enough to induce the audience to share the sympathy of the women for the wife and agree with them that the trifles which tell the story should not be revealed."

J. Ellen Gainor has argued: "Widely regarded as the most tightly structured and thematically compelling of Glaspell's dramas, Trifles has been repeatedly anthologized and produced, standing as an exemplar of the one-act play form in numerous studies of the genre.... Her vivid use of offstage characters in Trifles will become a hallmark of her playwriting, recurring in Bernice, Inheritors, and Alison's House, among others. Mysteries and the process of deduction also recur throughout her plays, making Trifles both a representative work and one that adumbrates the themes and methods of many of her subsequent drarnas. Moreover, with Trifles she develops her technique of conscious manipulation of audiences' perspectives, so that they can see as she has done, which then allows her feminist and other progressive political views to come to the fore."

Other plays by Glaspell written during this period included The People (1917), The Outside (1917), Woman's Honour (1918), Inheritors (1921) and The Verge (1921). Glaspell acted in some of these plays. Her biographer, Linda Ben-Zvi, has pointed out in Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times (2005): She was a natural actor in her own work, and her performances in subsequent plays would be equally praised for their naturalness and power." William Zorach, who worked with her in the Provincetown Theatre Group has argued that "Susan Glaspell was a marvelous actress. Acting played a minor part in her life, but she had that rare power and quality inherent in great actresses. She had only to be on the stage and the play and the audience came alive."

Glaspell suffered several miscarriages. She later wrote: "Jig and I did not have children. Perhaps it is true there was a greater intensity between us because of this. Even that, we would have forgone." Floyd Dell wrote in his autobiography, Homecoming (1933) that Glaspell relationship with George Jig Cook was very difficult: "For Susan Glaspell my respect and admiration grew immensely; it is a difficult position to be the wife of a man who is driven by a daemon, a position from which any mortal woman might, however great her love, shrink in dismay or turn away in weariness; but it was a position which she maintained with a sense and radiant dignity."

Many of the productions that appeared at Provincetown were later transferred to New York City. These were initially performed at an experimental theatre on MacDougal Street but some of the plays, especially by Susan Glaspell were extremely well-received. Rebecca Drucker of the The New York Tribune wrote on 20th April 1919: "It is incredible that some enterprising manager has not seized upon the exceedingly high gifts of Susan Glaspell. She is fresh and original genius in the theatre - shrewdly aware of human values, satiric and sensitive."

The Provincetown Theatre Group came to an when its star writer, Eugene O'Neill, decided to deal directly with Broadway. As Floyd Dell pointed out: "George Cook had come to a crisis in his life; he was spiritually centered in the plays of Eugene O'Neill, and now the young playwright had decided to deal directly with Broadway, refusing to allow the Provincetown Players to put on his plays before they went uptown. This was an entirely reasonable decisions on his part, but it broke George Cook's heart."

George Jig Cook eventually came to the conclusion that the Provincetown Theatre Group had failed: "Three years ago, writing for the Provincetown Players, anticipating the forlornness of our hope to bring to birth in our commercial-minded country a theatre whose motive was spiritual... I am now forced to confess that our attempt to build up, by our own life and death, in this alien sea, a coral island of our own, has failed. The failure seems to be more our own than America's. Lacking the instinct of the coral-builders, in which we could have found the happiness of continuing ourselves toward perfection, we have developed little willingness to die for the thing we are building. Our individual gifts and talents have sought their private perfection." The two main figures in the group, Cook and Glaspell, suspended operations and moved to Greece.

Glaspell had to visit the United States but when she returned she found him unwell: "Jig was not well. I found him thinner when I returned from America, and he was thinner now than then. He would get tired of the food.... His thinner face, and his beard, made him look older. His moustache was black, like the eyebrows, but the beard, like his hair, was white... He looked like a man of the mountain; more and more his eyes were the eyes of a seer."

Cook was diagnosed as suffering from typhus or glanders. However, he was too weak to be taken to Athens. The doctor told Susan Glaspell that he was dying: "Most of the time was unconscious, but I could call him to a moment's consciousness. His eyes and mine could meet, and know. I came to feel I must not do it, that it might call him into what I must shield him from knowing... It was at midnight of the second day that Jig, who had been in much distress, fell back on his pillows. His breathing slowed. There came that moment when he did not breathe again."

George Jig Cook died on 14th January, 1924. Floyd Dell wrote: "I loved him, and I would have had his life and death other than they were. I would have him die for Russia and the future, rather than Greece and the past." Greek Coins: Poems of George Cram Cook was published posthumously in 1925. An account of her life with Cook, The Road to the Temple, appeared in 1926.

Glaspell's plays became very popular in Britain. Edith Craig, the daughter of Ellen Terry, had established a feminist theatre group, the Pioneer Players. They had initially performed Trifles and this was followed in March 1925, with a production of The Verge. The review in The Manchester Guardian claimed that "Susan Glaspell is the greatest playwright we have had writing in English since George Bernard Shaw began. I am not sure she is not the greatest dramatist since Ibsen." James Agate, the famous drama critic argued: "Nobody whose genius was less than Ibsen's could have hoped to tackle such a theme. I stand my ground. The Verge is a great play."

Glaspell returned to Provincetown and a book of short-stories, A Jury of Her Peers was published in 1927. The title story was again based on the John Hossack case. This was followed by two novels, Brook Evans (1928) and The Fugitive's Return (1929). She also wrote the play, Alison's House, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Eugene O'Neill sent her a message that said: "An honor long overdue!!"

Glaspell had a long, passionate relationship with the writer Norman Matson. Neith Boyce wrote to Hutchins Hapgood that: "I see Susan occasionally, but always with constraint. She is completely in love and absorbed in Norman, coos over him and flatters him, and looks like a fat cat." However, in 1932 he left her and married Anna Walling, the daughter of William English Walling and Anna Strunsky.

Glaspell, like her good friend, Eugene O'Neill, suffered from alcoholism and during the 1930s she wrote very little. She confided to Dorothy Meyer, "I have to find out if I don't write because I drink or drink because I don't write." Glaspell was now desperately short of money and her friend Hallie Flanagan, arranged for her to become Midwest Bureau Director for the Federal Theater Project, a project that was part of the New Deal program.

While living in Chicago she decided to try and give up alcohol. According to Mary Heaton Vorse: "Susan's greatest battle took place in a small apartment in Chicago. It was there she conquered her drinking demon and went on to write once more." On her return to Provincetown she produced three novels, The Morning Is Near Us (1939), (1942) and Judd Rankin's Daughter (1945).

Susan Glaspell died on 27th July 1948.

(1) In his autobiography Homecoming, Floyd Dell wrote about how George Gig Cook met Susan Glaspell in 1903.

George and I called upon Susan Glaspell, a young newspaperwoman who began a brilliant career as a novelist. She read us some of her just-finished novel, The Glory of the Conquered, the liveliness and humour of which we admired greatly, though George deplored to me on the way home the lamentable conventionality of the author's views of life. Susan was a slight, gentle, sweet, whimsically humourous girl, a little ethereal in appearance, but evidently a person of great energy, and brimful of talent; but, we agreed, too medieval-romantic in her views of life.

Although Glaspell had little exposure to criminal law, she initially approached the case like a detective; she personally investigated the murder, visiting the Hossack farmhouse, interviewing the attorneys, and studying the inquest testimony. ... The case made an indelible impression on Glaspell. More than fifteen years later ... the haunting image of Margaret Hossack's kitchen came rushing back to Glaspell. In a span of ten days, Glaspell composed a one-act play, Trifles ... A year later, Glaspell reworked the material into a short story titled A Jury of Her Peers.

So I went out on the wharf, sat alone on one of our wooden benches without a back, and looked a long time at that bare little stage. After a time the stage became a kitchen-a kitchen there all by itself. I saw just where the stove was, the table, and the steps going upstairs. Then the door at the back opened, and people all bundled up came in-two or three men, I wasn't sure which, but sure enough about the two women, who hung back, reluctant to enter that kitchen.... I hurried in from the wharf to write down what I had seen. Whenever I got stuck, I would run across the street to the old wharf, sit in that leaning little theatre under which the sea sounded, until the play was ready to continue. Sometimes things written in my room would not form on the stage, and I must go home and cross them out.

For Susan Glaspell my respect and admiration grew immensely; it is a difficult position to be the wife of a man who is driven by a daemon, a position from which any mortal woman might, however great her love, shrink in dismay or turn away in weariness; but it was a position which she maintained with a sense and radiant dignity.

It was in Chicago he (George Cook) was married, to a girl of beauty and charm whom he met through friends there, and after a summer at the Cabin they went to California, where jig will teach English at Leland Standford University under Professor Anderson, his old teacher. Already he has the idea, which grows important in his life, that it is better a writer make his living in some other way than by writing. It seemed to him that this either conscious or unconscious adapting of one's work to what it will mean in money was as a blight. He thought there were ways of freeing oneself ; he cared enough about it to shape his life toward that ideal of giving the mind free play.

We hauled out the old boat, took oars and nets and anchors to various owners, bought lumber at the second wharf "up-along," and Jig, Nordfeldt, Ballantine, Joe O'Brien, others helping, converted the fish-house into the Wharf Theatre, a place where ninety people could see a play, if they didn't mind sitting close together on wooden benches with no backs. The stage, ten feet by twelve, was in four sections, so we could have different levels, could run it through the big sliding-door at the back, a variety of set surprising in quarters so small.

We gave a first bill, then met at our house to read plays for a second. Two Irishmen, one old and one young, had arrived and taken a shack just up the street. " Terry," I said to the one not young, " Haven't you a play to read to us?"

"No," said Terry Carlin, " I don't write, I just think, and sometimes talk. But Mr. O'Neill has got a whole trunk full of plays," he smiled.

That didn't sound too promising, but I said: "Well, tell Mr. O'Neill to come to our house at eight o'clock to-night, and bring some of his plays."

So Gene took "Bound East for Cardiff" from his trunk, and Freddie Burt read it to us, Gene staying out in the dining-room while the reading went on.

He was not left alone in the dining-room when the reading had finished.

Then we knew what we were for. We began in faith, and perhaps it is true when you do, that "all these things shall be added unto you."

I may see it through memories too emotional, but it seems to me I have never sat before a more moving production than our "Bound East for Cardiff," when Eugene O'Neill was produced for the first time on any stage. Jig was Yank. As he lay in his bunk dying, he talked of life as one who knew he must leave it.

The sea has been good to Eugene O'Neill. It was there for his opening. There was a fog, just as the script demanded, fog bell in the harbour. The tide was in, and it washed under us and around, spraying through the holes in the floor, giving us the rhythm and the flavour of the sea while the big dying sailor talked to his friend Drisc of the life he had always wanted deep in the land, where you'd never see a ship or smell the sea.

It is not merely figurative language to say the old wharf shook with applause.

The people who had seen the plays, and the people who gave them, were adventurers together. The spectators were part of the Players, for how could it have been done without the feeling that came from them, without that sense of them there, waiting, ready to share, giving-finding the deep level.

Trifles takes only thirty minutes to perform, but in that time Susan is able to offer one of the most powerful plays ever presented by the Provincetown Players, a work that riveted the first audience who saw it in the summer of 1916 and is still able to speak as forcefully to audiences around the world in the twenty-first century, a credit to its author's skill and a mark of how little has changed in the intervening years. It begins as five characters enter the kitchen of an isolated, rural farmhouse where a murder has been committed. A man has been strangled while he slept; and his wife, who claimed to be sleeping beside him at the time, has been accused of the crime and taken to jail to await trial. Those prosecuting the case, County Attorney Henderson and Sheriff Peters, have returned to the scene to search for "something to make a story about-a thing that would connect up with this strange way of doing it. Accompanying them are a neighbor farmer, Mr. Hale, who found the body; Mrs. Peters, the sheriff's wife, who has the task of bringing the accused woman some things; and Mrs. Hale, who keeps Mrs. Peters company while the men move around the upstairs bedroom and perimeter of the farmhouse searching for clues.

Left alone in the kitchen, the women, with furtive glances and few words, slowly construct their own theories about the crime. As they imagine her, Minnie Foster Wright is a lonely, childless woman, married to a taciturn husband, isolated from neighbors because of poverty and the rigors of farm life. When they discover a birdcage, its door ripped off and a canary, its neck wrung, they have no trouble mating the connection: the husband killed the bird, the wife's only comfort, just as he strangled her birdlike spirit. She, in turn, strangled him - a punishment to fit his crime. The motive and method of murder become as clear to them as the signs of sudden anger they infer from the half-wiped kitchen table and Minnie's erratic quilt stitching." Based on such circumstantial evidence, the women try the case, find the accused guilty, but dismiss the charges, and hide the evidence from the men, since their verdict is justifiable homicide. By so doing, Susan is able to create a new type of modern theatre, not based on actions observed by characters or audience but on the "reading" of actions and the construction of narratives depending on individual interpretations and subjective frames of reference. The question of truth becomes moot in the play. Minnie's guilt is not the issue; the real focus is on the ways in which the women are able to intuit her motives, drawing their interpretations from their own lives. In the ways in which they bond together and take action, the women become a true "jury of her peers."

While she keeps many of the details of the original Hossack case, Susan makes certain alterations. Of the original names of the participants, only Henderson is used, assigned to the country attorney rather than the defense lawyer. Margaret Hossack has been renamed Minnie Foster Wright, the pun on the surname marking her lack of "rights" and perhaps implying her "right" to act against her abusive husband. Susan adds Mr. Hale, a composite of the Indianola farmers who testified at the Hossack trial. She also changes the murder weapon, from an ax to a rope, the perfect dramatic correlative for the strangulations the play depicts. Her most striking alterations are her excision of the wife and the change of venue from the courthouse to the kitchen. In the play Minnie never appears. Since the audience never sees the accused woman, it is not swayed by her person but, rather, by her assumed condition, that of an abused wife, driven to commit a terrible act.

Susan displays extraordinary skill in constructing this brief play, her first independent theatre work. With only a stove, chairs, and assorted kitchen items as props-those "trifles" the men derisively dismiss and overlook-she creates a powerful muse-en-scene that uses expressionistic touches to externalize Minnie's desperate state of mind. Things are barren, broken, cold, imprisoning, and violent. Susan also moves beyond realism by choosing a conventional form, well-known to her audience - the detective story - and then systematically dismantling it. In her version the lawmen are quickly shunted offstage to roam about on the periphery of the action, their presence marked theatrically by their shuffling sounds above the heads of the women, another expressionistic touch. She thus undercuts the male authority wielded in the original case and throws into question masculine-sanctioned power in general.

Besides Eugene O'Neill, the Provincetown Players produced one major talent in Susan Glaspell. Her work is in many ways more controlled than O'Neill's. Her style is more reticent.... Yet she shared her husband's visionary drive, his sense of a Nietzschean life force operating as a counterweight to a tragic potential. And this breaks through on occasion in lyrical arias, apostrophes to the human spirit, at times unbalancing and sentimental, at times affecting in the simplicity of their expression.

People sometimes said, "Jig is not a business man," when it seemed opportunities were passed by. But those opportunities were not things wanted from deep. He had a unique power to see just how the thing he wanted done could be done. He could finance for the spirit, and seldom confused, or betrayed, by extending the financing beyond the span he saw ahead, not weighing his adventure down with schemes that would become things in themselves.

He wrote a letter to the people who had seen the plays, asking if they cared to become associate members of the Provincetown Players. The purpose was to give American playwrights of sincere purpose a chance to work out their ideas in freedom, to give all who worked with the plays their opportunity as artists. Were they interested in this ? One dollar for the three remaining bills.

The response paid for seats and stage, and for sets. A production need not cost a lot of money, Jig would say. The most expensive set at the Wharf Theatre cost thirteen dollars. There were sets at the Provincetown Playhouse which cost little more. He liked to remember " The Knight of the Burning Pestle " they gave at Leland Standford, where a book could indicate one house and a bottle another. Sometimes the audience liked to make its own set.

"Now Susan," he said to me, briskly, "I have announced a play of yours for the next bill."

"But I have no play!"

"Then you will have to sit down tomorrow and begin one." "I protested. I did not know how to write a play. I had never "studied it."

Nonsense," said Jig. "You've got a stage, haven't you?"

So I went out on the wharf, sat alone on one of our wooden benches without a back, and looked a long time at that bare little stage. After a time the stage became a kitchen, - a kitchen there all by itself. I saw just where the stove was, the table, and the steps going upstairs. Then the door at the back opened, and people all bundled up came in - two or three men, I wasn't sure which, but sure enough about the two women, who hung back, reluctant to enter that kitchen. When I was a newspaper reporter out in Iowa, I was sent down-state to do a murder trial, and I never forgot going into the kitchen of a woman locked up in town. I had meant to do it as a short story, but the stage took it for its own, so I hurried in from the wharf to write down what I had seen. Whenever I got stuck, I would run across the street to the old wharf, sit in that leaning little theatre under which the sea sounded, until the play was ready to continue. Sometimes things written in my room would not form on the stage, and I must go home and cross them out. " What playwrights need is a stage," said Jig, "their own stage."

By the summer of 1918, Susan had known Eugene O'Neill for two years; they were colleagues, fellow workers, and the leading playwrights of the Provincetown Players. At the outset of their relationship, the younger man had kept his distance, preferring to spend time with his male friends Terry Carlin and Hutch Collins or with a number of women, including Nina Moise and Dorothy Day, who served as surrogates for Louise Bryant. However, during the preceding fall something had happened that altered O'Neill's life and his relationship with Susan. The twenty-four-year-old writer Agnes Boulton, recently widowed, had come to the Village to try to sell some of her romance fiction, in order to support her daughter, parents, and the dairy farm she owned in Connecticut. Her only contacts were Christine Ell, whom she had met previously, and Mary Pyne. At a reunion with Christine at the Hell Hole, she was introduced to O'Neill, who was immediately taken with this dark-haired woman with large, soulful eyes. "I want to spend every night of my life from now on with you," he told her, at the end of their first evening together, as they stood outside the Brevoort hotel, where she was staying." When Agnes came to a party for the Players at Christine's a few nights later, she also met Susan, who remarked on Agnes's striking resemblance to Louise. The romance between Gene and Agnes moved quickly; by January he had convinced her to go with him to Provincetown, since the battles being waged at the theatre were distracting him from writing, and the death from a heroin overdose of his good friend Louis Holladay, Polly's brother, was a shadow he wished to escape. After spending the winter together in a small studio that John Francis arranged for them, they got married on April 12, two days before Susan and jig's anniversary-dates the two couples would celebrate jointly over the next few years. By the summer Agnes and Gene had taken up residence in Francis's Flats, across Commercial Street near Susan and Jig's home.

During the summer of 1918 Gene got into the habit of visiting Susan each day immediately after both had finished their morning's work. The visits, to which Agnes was not invited, made the young bride grumpy and quiet when Gene would finally return "having stayed in that quiet restful house for too long." Gene was thirty, Susan forty-two, but that did not quiet Agnes. Agnes was aware of the soothing quality Susan exuded, her "feminine inner spirit, a fire, a sensitiveness that showed in her fine brown eyes and in the way that she used her hands and spoke." She knew of "many men who found her conversation simulating and helpful," since she could discuss "everything that was going on in the world - economics, the rights of mankind, the theatre, writing, people - and she was able to talk of them when necessary with charm and interest." Agnes, in comparison, felt herself far inferior: unworldly and inarticulate. She was then supporting Gene with her writing, mostly romance potboilers like "Ooh La La!"'; Susan wrote for Harper's. Agnes also knew it was always Susan, not Jig, whom Gene sought out for a talk. Whenever he wrote to the pair, he would invariably address the letter to Susan; his queries about his work and the Players were taken up with her. The critic Travis Bogard describes what O'Neill generally sought in friendships: "In a woman, performance of the functions of wife, mother, mistress, and chatelaine were sought; in a man, a combination of editorial solicitude, listening ability, financial acumen, and a producer's willingness to serve the demands of the artist were essential."' Susan was unique among O'Neill's relationships; all those qualities sought in men, he found in her, plus the decidedly feminine aura she radiated, which Agnes recognized. They talked about their work, read each other's finished manuscripts, and assisted each other whenever possible. She was the only playwright with whom he forged such a close personal and professional relationship.

After a first night there would be a party in our club-room over the theatre. We were very poor at times, but never so poor we couldn't have wine for these parties. It was important we drink together, for thus were wounds healed, and we became one again, impulse and courage as if they had never been threatened. We had said hard things to one another in the drive of the last rehearsals, the strain of opening night. Now I might see Jig's arm around a neck he had threatened to wring. "Jig, you are getting drunk," some one would say. "It is for the good of the Provincetown Players," he would explain. "I am always ready to sacrifice myself to a cause." When the wine began to show the bottom of the bowl," Give it all to me," Jig would propose, "and I guarantee to intoxicate all the rest of you." He glowed at these parties. Things which years before had lain lonely in his mind flowed into a happy convivial hour, and dawn might find him eloquently espousing the cause of the elephant as over the lion, perhaps closing with a blaze of prophecy of a world in which men did not tear each other as lions tore, but where the strongest was he who did not feed upon his brother.

Widely regarded as the most tightly structured and thematically compelling of Glaspell's dramas, Trifles has been repeatedly anthologized and produced, standing as an exemplar of the one-act play form in numerous studies of the genre. Early reviews of the play glimpsed the radical possibilities liberated by Glaspell's method. Heywood Broun, who would soon become a strong supporter of the Provincetown players, first developed his positive opinion of Glaspell's writing when he saw the November 1916 production of Trifles by the Washington Square Players....

Broun's review synthesizes Glaspell's interweaving of gender roles and the detection process. He grasps the empathic process central to the women's growing understanding of Minnie and her presumed actions. Arthur Hornblow, the critic for Theatre Magazine, praised the production more succinctly as "an ingenious Study in feminine ability at inductive and deductive analysis by which two women through trifles bring out the motive for a murder". These reviews point to the dramaturgy. Her vivid use of offstage characters in Trifles will become a hallmark of her playwriting, recurring in Bernice, Inheritors, and Alison's House, among others. Mysteries and the process of deduction also recur throughout her plays, making Trifles both a representative work and one that adumbrates the themes and methods of many of her subsequent drarnas. Moreover, with Trifles she develops her technique of conscious manipulation of audiences' perspectives, so that they can see as she has done, which then allows her feminist and other progressive political views to come to the fore.

Few Americans, I think, felt the war from so profound a tragic sense. "Feeling about life (its immensity, its vast antiquity, its minute complexity) and love, which is the farthest point from death that living things attain in their vibration between life and death."

He spoke often of what Nietzsche had said: "All nations claim to be armed for self-defence. Then let Germany, the strongest, disarm." He coveted for his own country that gesture Germany had not made.

Later, in notes for a play, he writes: " Statesman with vision of the surprising safety of disarmament. Grandeur of it. Profound courage of it. The strength of Christ."

He was thrilled by "Too proud to fight," and saw a great drama in The Rise and Fall of President Wilson.

Only once did he feel like going into the war himself, when Germany went on into Russia after Russia had stopped. In war politics he felt as true many things which have since been disclosed. His ardour through those years went to Russia. When the draft included the men of his age he wanted to state his refusal. I urged delay, stressing his own idea of keeping burning, to the measure we could, the light of creative imagination. My fears were for where his intensity might take him, once that fight were begun. But he wrote on the questionnaire he returned : " I will not go into Russia to fight or police Russian working-men."

He had remained a Socialist, but political interests had become less personal, absorbed in the creation of his own community. " Aridity, a dryness, about generalizations such as the great generalization of Socialism, unless these are given body by fresh and ever fresh facts. A generalization is like an organism. In order to remain living it must be fed with particulars, must eliminate waste.

"Unless the Socialist movement is going to make room in itself for a culture as broad and imaginative as any aristocratic culture, it would be better for the world that it perish from the earth."

(14) George Jig Cook, Provincetown Theatre Group (1919)

Three years ago, writing for the Provincetown Players, anticipating the forlornness of our hope to bring to birth in our commercial-minded country a theatre whose motive was spiritual, I made this promise: "We promise to let this theatre die rather than let it become another voice of mediocrity."

I am now forced to confess that our attempt to build up, by our own life and death, in this alien sea, a coral island of our own, has failed. The failure seems to be more our own than America's. Lacking the instinct of the coral-builders, in which we could have found the happiness of continuing ourselves toward perfection, we have developed little willingness to die for the thing we are building.

Our individual gifts and talents have sought their private perfection. We have not, as we hoped, created the beloved community of life-givers. Our richest, like our poorest, have desired most not to give life, but to have it given to them. We have valued creative energy less than its rewards-our sin against our Holy Ghost.

As a group we are not more but less than the great chaotic, unhappy community in whose dry heart I have vainly tried to create an oasis of living beauty.

"Since we have failed spiritually in the elemental things - failed to pull together - failed to do what any good football or baseball team or crew do as a matter of course with no word said - and since the result of this is mediocrity, we keep our promise: We give this theatre we love good death; the Provincetown Players end their story here.

Some happier gateway must let in the spirit which seems to be seeking to create a soul under the ribs of death in the American theatre.

Jig was not well. I found him thinner when I returned from America, and he was thinner now than then. He would get tired of the food. In Agorgiani I urged to go to Athens and see a doctor. He would say he was going, but instead wanted to come to Kalania.

His thinner face, and his beard, made him look older. His moustache was black, like the eyebrows, but the beard, like his hair, was white. "Let it be wild here on Parnassos," he said, " then later we can see what it wants to do." He enjoyed the beard. I used to tease him about getting vain, for he would look at it and comb and form it this way and that. His white hair, too, would grow rather long. He looked like a man of the mountain ; more and more his eyes were the eyes of a seer.

(16) Floyd Dell wrote about Susan Glaspell and George Gig Cook in 1961.

My friend George Cook died in Greece in 1926. I had heard that he got with the shepherds, and was adored by them. Susan Glaspell has told the story of those days with great sympathy in The Road to the Temple. Susan Glaspell has said in her book that she has sometimes thought I would write a book about George. He was too close to me to be just to him. I loved him, and I would have had his life and death other than they were. I would have him die for Russia and the future, rather than Greece and the past. And if I wrote a book about George, that is what I should wish him to do.

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Susan Glaspell, the daughter of Elmer Glaspell and Alice Keating, was born in Davenport, Iowa on 1st July 1876. She graduated from Drake University in Des Moines in 1899 and found work as a journalist with the Des Moines Daily News. On 2nd December, 1900, John Hossack was murdered with an axe as he slept.

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She suffered several miscarriages
(same link as the second fact)

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1. Sense of disillusionment and loss of faith in the "American Dream": the independent, self-reliant, individual will triumph.
2. Emphasis on bold experimentation in style and form over the traditional.
3. Interest in the inner workings of the human mind (ex. Stream of consciousness).

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Lorraine Hansberry
-A Raisin in the Sun

F. Scott Fitzgerald
-The Great Gatsby

William Faulkner
-"A Rose for Emily"

Eudora Welty
-"A Worn Path"

Robert Frost
-poetry

T. S. Eliot
-The Waste Land
-"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"

John Steinbeck
-Of Mice and Men
-The Grapes of Wrath

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Artists embraced freedom with their works
https://www.mdc.edu/wolfson/academic/artsletters/art_philosophy/humanities/history_of_modernism.htm

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Modernism was a style describes as unconventional, simplistic, abstract, and even ridiculous.

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1) World War I
1914-1918

2) The Great Depression
1929-1939

3) World War II
1939-1945

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The American Dreams in the 20's: Fact #1

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The American Dreams in the 20's: Fact #1

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It was all about materialism and many people went after money

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The American dream is an illusion that is deeply implanted in the minds of the people, it sets a bar for life achievement and offers hope to work hard to achieve their dreams. As for Americans, they are raised in a society to where they are expected to make lots money and to have a healthy family. After all in our society success is largely based off positions of power and financial stability. For example, in For example, Myrtle Wilson, Tom's mistress, is married to a hard working husband, when she initially meets Tom on the train, she doesn't falls in love with him, she falls in love with the way he wears like a gentleman, "He had on a dress suit and patent leather shoes, and I couldn't keep my eyes off him" (Fitzgerald 36). Regardless of being physically abused by Tom Buchanan, she still tolerated his violent behaviors to be closer to her ideal American dream: receiving the power of money. The Great Gatsby, written by F. Scott Fitzgerald, there were multiple interpretations of the ideal American dream in the 1920s. In the 1920s, due to the growth of materialism, people advertised and fancied the power of money to fulfilling their dreams. The growing economy was slowly becoming satisfied by the large consuming behavior, creating ...show more content...
Even though wealthy people have the power of their riches to purchase their materialistic commodities, money fails to provide enough power to successfully complete their American dream as well as pursue their felicity. To illustrate, Jay Gatsby invited Daisy over to his mansion to demonstrate his fortune and success to her, he was convinced that his large fortune would be enough to urge her to divorce her husband, Tom Buchanan, and return back to him. However, Gatsby's dreams were crushed when he doesn't successfully persuade Daisy to divorce Tom and get married with

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What Is The American Dream In The 1920s | ipl.org

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The American dream is an illusion that is deeply implanted in the minds of the people, it sets a bar for life achievement and offers hope to work hard to...

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People wanted to discover their "true self"
https://www.encyclopedia.com/education/educational-magazines/american-dream-twentieth-century

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Harlem Renaissance 1920-1940 "The Jazz Age" "The Roaring 20s"

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Harlem Renaissance 1920-1940 "The Jazz Age" "The Roaring 20s"

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1.Black cultural movement in Harlem, New York
2.Some poetry rhythms based on spirituals and jazz, lyrics on the blues, and diction from the street talk of the ghettos
3. Other poetry used conventional lyrical forms

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1. James Weldon Johnson

2. Claude McKay

3. Countee Cullen

4. Langston Hughes (poetry)

5. Zora Neale Hurston

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During the Harlem Renaissance, there was a musical explosion. The music that vocalized Harlem's nightlife was jazz and blues.
(https://macaulay.cuny.edu/seminars/henken08/articles/r/e/n/Renaissance_and_Music_b361.html#:~:text=There%20was%20an%20explosion%20of,a%20rhythm%20that%20encouraged%20dancing.)

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Artists during the Harlem Renaissance worked in a variety of genres, but the main trend was to experiment with a mix of realism, modernism, African art, and even antiquity.
(https://magazine.artland.com/art-movement-harlem-renaissance/#:~:text=What%20was%20the%20style%20of,and%20even%20elements%20of%20antiquity.)

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1) "The New Negro Movement"
1919-1925

2) Prohibition
1920-1933

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 The American Dream during the 30's and 40's

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 The American Dream during the 30's and 40's

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The American Dream in the 30's meant having freedom, mutual respect, and equal opportunities for everyone.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/04/upshot/the-transformation-of-the-american-dream.html

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The American dream in the '40s was all about stability. It was best to have a house, a steady job, and a good family.
https://www.lovemoney.com/galleries/84477/what-the-american-dream-looked-like-the-decade-you-were-born#:~:text=The%20American%20Dream%20in%20the,consumption%20began%20to%20gain%20traction.

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The American Dream in the 50s centered on nuclear families living in modern, suburban homes. (https://www.smokyhillmuseum.org/exhibits/online_exhibits_folder/1950s-an-american-dream.html#:~:text=The%20American%20dream%20of%20the,color%20to%20target%20consumer%20behaviors.)

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The American Dream in the 50s focused heavily on materialism. Every family needed their cars, radios, and television sets. They also wanted gender roles to be a big part of the Dream. Women were supposed to stay at home and care for the kids, while the men were supposed to go and work to get money for the family.
(https://express.adobe.com/page/l5MV4/#:~:text=In%20the%201950s%2C%20the%20American,wealth%2C%20freedom%2C%20and%20equality.)

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1. Influenced by studies of media, language, and information technology.
2. Sense that little is unique; culture endlessly duplicates itself.
3. New literary forms and techniques: works composed of only dialogue, or combining fiction and nonfiction, experimenting with physical appearance of their work.

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1) Alice Walker

2) Wallace Stevens

3) e.e. cummings

4) Maya Angelou

5) Anne Sexton

6) James Baldwin

7) Richard Wright

8) Sandra Cisneros

9)Amy Tan

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An interesting fact I learned about Alice Walker is that she was accidentally blinded in one eye, so her mother gave her a typewriter, allowing her to write instead of doing chores.(https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alice-Walker#:~:text=Alice%20Walker%20was%20born%20in,write%20instead%20of%20doing%20chores)

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What I thought was really cool, was that Anne Sexton got so many awards including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the 1967 Shelley Memorial Prize, the 1962 Levinson Prize, and the Frost Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. She seems like a very accomplished woman

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1) Korean War
1950-1953

2) Vietnam War
1954-1975

# data[].attributes.headline
The American Dream during the 60's and 70's

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The American Dream during the 60's and 70's

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-> The 1960s American Dream was all about peace, freedom, and equality.
-> African Americans struggled for their equality and rights.
(https://prezi.com/tab1ghtaneqb/the-american-dream-of-the 1960s/#:~:text=The%20American%20Dream%20in%20the,especially%20African%20Americans%20and%20women.)

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-> In the 1970s, the American Dream was to live peacefully in life.
-> The family was important in the 1970s, as were the current musical trends.
-> Hippies were popular, and everyone had to work hard for what they had to live.
(https://prezi.com/xdiv7xjqcz4a/the-american-dream-in-the-1970s/#:~:text=The%20American%20Dream%20in%20the%201970s%20was%20to%20live%20a,what%20was%20essential%20to%20live.)

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The American Dream in the 1980s was mostly about making as much money as possible.
(https://www.facebook.com/cnbcprimetv/videos/in-the-80s-the-american-dream-was-transformed-the-idea-of-america-as-a-place-whe/764886974235521/)

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In the ‘80s, the American Dream was transformed. The idea of America as a place where if you play by the rules you’ll succeed was completely turned... | By CNBC Prime | Facebook

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၇၈၇ views, ၂ likes, ၀ loves, ၁ comments, ၁ shares, Facebook Watch Videos from CNBC Prime: In the ‘80s, the American Dream was transformed. The idea of America as a place where if you play by the...

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People wanted to have freedom with their lives and wanted to have fun living.
(Pictures people going to a heavy metal concert for fun)

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The American Dream during the 90's and early 2000's 

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The American Dream during the 90's and early 2000's 

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In the 1990s, technology began to have a significant impact on the American dream. People began to crave their own laptops, cell phones, televisions (one for each room), and video games.
(https://www.rd.com/list/how-the-american-dream-has-changed/)

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American Dream in the early 2000's: Fact #2

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American Dream in the early 2000's: Fact #2

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During the early 2000s, being a billionaire, appearing on a reality show, and becoming a celebrity was all part of the American dream (essentially, being famous or having a lot of money, or both).
(https://prezi.com/io54bmwsgp7-/2000-present-american-dream/#:~:text=The%20american%20dream%20of%20the,%2C%20planes%2C%20boats%2C%20etc.)

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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

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The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

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Juliet Ashton is a writer who ends up writing letters to a man who lives on the island of Guernsey. She eventually goes to the island and becomes closer to the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. This book revolves around war and a group of people secretly reading books and gaining knowledge together.
References: https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/21st-century-american-literature and I've watched the movie before

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This has been one of my favorite activities that I've done this semester! At first I didn't know if it would be that interesting connecting literature to things that have happened in the past, but after I started working on this timeline I realized it was super interesting! Literature has played such a huge part in history and doing this assignment has helped me to see how much the world has progressed and changed over the years. The world is a dark place and literature has the power to show that darkness to people who are oblivious. It also can show the parts that are light and happy to help us not focus on the darkness all of the time. Overall, I've learned a lot this semester.