Three Midwestern Playwrights: How Floyd Dell, George Cram Cook, and Susan Glaspell Transformed American Theatre

The story of bohemian life and avant-garde culture in Chicago and New York in the second decade of the twentieth century has by now been told many times. It seems to hold the same fascination for readers and writers as that of the English Romantic poets a century earlier. I have watched the growing attention given to the so-called Chicago renaissance and to the Greenwich Village of the 1910s since 1958 – 59, when I was the first person to go through Floyd Dell's papers at the Newberry Library and wrote, as my dissertation, a critical biography of him. Dell, primarily known as a novelist and a literary and social critic, was in many ways the central figure both in Chicago (1909 – 1913) and then in the Village (1913 – 1919). What Noe's book has now added to the accumulated body of scholarly and journalistic work is a study (notable for the thoroughness of its research and documentation) focusing on three of the charter members of the Provincetown Players (1915 – 1922) — Dell, George Cram Cook (their guiding spirit), and Susan Glaspell (later a Pulitzer Prize winner for drama).The reason for concentrating on these three (rather than on other members of the group, such as Eugene O'Neill, John Reed, Max Eastman, and Edna St. Vincent Millay, all of whom have in any case been extensively studied already) is that all three came from Davenport, Iowa. Several other writers who achieved a national reputation emerged from Davenport during the same years: the poet Arthur Davison Ficke, the journalist and novelist Charles Eugene Banks, and the critic Harry Hansen among them. (And Octave Thanet was still there, a famous presence from an earlier generation.) The remarkable phenomenon of so many writers coming out of a single midwestern city of about thirty or forty thousand certainly deserves attention. Noe gives a detailed account of the economic development and the political, cultural, and philanthropic activity in the city stretching back to the 1830s. Intellectual life was supported by touring theatrical companies, an art association, a public library, and a large number of literary, musical, and political clubs that offered opportunities for discussion of ideas. The cosmopolitanism of the city was influenced by the presence of German immigrants and visitors from Mississippi River boats. This picture of social and cultural life in a small midwestern city in the days before radio and television is of interest in its own right. But Noe uses it to show how the long-established progressive tradition in Davenport nourished the outlook and affected the achievement of Dell, Cook, and Glaspell. The result is a striking case study of how a knowledge of deep context (where everything is relevant) can illuminate writers’ accomplishments.