Trifles & Other Plays: Four Plays by Susan Glaspell Trifles

Susan Glaspell was born in Iowa in 1876 to Elmer Glaspell, a hay farmer, and his wife Alice Keating, a public school teacher. She had an older brother, Raymond, and a younger brother, Frank. She was raised on a rural homestead just below the bluffs of the Mississippi River along the western edge of Davenport, Iowa. This property had been bought by her paternal great-grandfather James Glaspell from the federal government following its Black Hawk Purchase. Having a fairly conservative upbringing, "Susie" was remembered as "a precocious child" who would often rescue stray animals. As the family farm increasingly became surrounded by residential development, Glaspell's worldview was still shaped by the pioneer tales of her grandmother. She told of regular visits by Indians to the farm in the years before Iowa statehood. Growing up directly across the river from Black Hawk's ancestral village, Glaspell was also influenced by the Sauk leader's autobiography; he wrote that Americans should be worthy inheritors of the land. During the Panic of 1893, her father sold the farm, and the family moved into Davenport.