“Pioneer.” Linda Ben-Zvi could not have chosen a more appropriate term to introduce Susan Glaspell (1876–1948) in her biography, Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times (xii), winner of the 2005 Special Jury Prize of the American Library Association. Glaspell pioneered modern drama in the United States, exploring new forms in each of the fifteen plays she wrote, from her expressionistic The Verge to her psychological Bernice, and from her absurdist Woman's Honor to her existentialist The Outside. She was a pioneer in her portrayal of female characters who refused traditional definitions of womanhood. She was also original in making use of the stage to show the struggles of women and to demand changes in women's lives toward a more equal society. And, doing justice to her own pioneer ancestors, Glaspell was never afraid of venturing out toward unknown domains, both in her writing and personal life.Ben-Zvi is among the pioneers in Glaspell studies. Following in the footsteps of predecessors such as Arthur Waterman in the 1960s and, most notably, Marcia Noe in the 1980s, she has contributed substantially to our understanding of Glaspell. Her pioneering studies on this long-neglected playwright, novelist, and short-story writer started with comparative studies exploring relationships between Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill, through whom she had arrived at Glaspell. With the distance time provides, it is interesting to reread those early articles. For example, in her earliest one, “Susan Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill” (1982), published in the Eugene O'Neill Newsletter, Ben-Zvi timidly suggests that Glaspell's The Verge might have influenced the expressionistic form of The Emperor Jones. Similarly, in “Susan Glaspell and Eugene O'Neill: The Imagery of Gender” (1986), also published in the Eugene O'Neill Newsletter, she explicitly says she does not wish to prove “influence,” but just to read the works of these playwrights in “juxtaposition.” It seems obvious that Ben-Zvi's strategy was to argue Glaspell's case by putting her side by side with O'Neill, as in their old Provincetown Players days, in a way that would nourish this metaphor: if O'Neill is the father of US modern drama, we should recognize in Glaspell the necessary mother. Over twenty years later, in the biography, Ben-Zvi makes strong claims about how Glaspell's works were “obvious catalysts” for O'Neill's (252). She convincingly argues that The Verge inspired not only The Emperor Jones, but also The Hairy Ape and even Strange Interlude. The time for delicate maternal imagery was over.The new millennium witnessed steadily increasing scholarly attention to Glaspell's life and work. The International Susan Glaspell Society was founded in 2003, and Ben-Zvi's Susan Glaspell was the fourth major monograph devoted to that author, preceded by Barbara Ozieblo's Susan Glaspell: A Critical Biography (2000), J. Ellen Gainor's Susan Glaspell in Context (2001), and Martha C. Carpentier's The Major Novels of Susan Glaspell (2001). All these works, and most notably Ozieblo's and Carpentier's, are products of second-wave feminists, authored by women who, moved by the resuscitation of Glaspell by Judith Fetterley's and Annette Kolodny's seminal work on “A Jury of Her Peers,” set out to rescue Glaspell from the agents of the patriarchal canon who had denied her worth. In the preface to the biography, Ben-Zvi acknowledges that her research started within this second-wave feminist framework, which, in her own words, would tell the story of Glaspell as “a victim, beset by patriarchal villains [O'Neill and George Cram Cook] who were somehow responsible for her erasure” (xi). During her work, however, she abandoned the feminist “savior” role (xi). Certainly, her biography is not as overtly feminist as Ozieblo's, or as Carpentier's approach to Glaspell's fiction, but, covertly, Ben-Zvi reveals her own feminist beliefs. For example, she acknowledges the ill effect on Glaspell's career of male critics who did not understand her male characters and therefore misinterpreted her writing. Denying an overt feminist standpoint allows Ben-Zvi to claim a space for Glaspell at the same time as she celebrates O'Neill and, most notably, Cook. From today's more third-wave feminist perspective, the disavowal seems unnecessary.Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times remains a vivid account of Glaspell's life. Ben-Zvi invested twenty-five years of meticulous research in the biography (see x), and her complementing and expansion of prior scholarship remain a gift for Glaspell scholars. The inclusion of first-hand accounts of and interviews with people who knew Glaspell are extremely valuable, as is the use of new material found in privately held collections that augments understanding of, for example, Glaspell's college activities, her trip to Paris, and her years in Chicago. Although it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between fact and fiction in the book's engaging prose (and indeed the book moves among biography, dramatic and literary criticism, theatre history, and even cultural history), the exploitation of new data is one of this book's strengths. Ben-Zvi found many gems, including a previously unknown play written for the bicentennial of the Mayflower landing, Free Laughter, the manuscript of which she found in the Regie Cabral Private Collection, in Provincetown, and which she co-edited with Gainor in Susan Glaspell: The Complete Plays (2010).We also owe the more thorough and sympathetic portrayal of “Jig” Cook, unprecedented in earlier Glaspell scholarship, to Ben-Zvi, who presents Cook as a loving husband and supportive partner. For example, in the standard account of how Glaspell came to write Trifles, manifest in Glaspell's The Road to the Temple as an attempt to mythologize the role Cook played in her dramatic career, Cook bullied a worried and confused Glaspell into writing a play. What emerges from Ben-Zvi's research, however, is Cook's blind faith in his wife's talent and his idea that all a playwright needs to write a play is a stage. As Ben-Zvi states, “Trifles was written under conditions most playwrights would envy” (173). Furthermore, Ben-Zvi dismisses Cook's extramarital relations as “passing flirtations” that Glaspell accepted and understood (213). For example, she finds Cook's well-known relationship with Ida Rauh “occasional” and sufficiently intermittent that Glaspell “stay[ed] friendly with Ida and married to Cook” (220). Previous commentators, contrastingly, had ascribed to Glaspell feelings of jealousy, torment, rivalry, and abandonment. While readers might wonder to what extent Ben-Zvi was influenced by Glaspell's hagiography of Cook—that same year, she would publish a revised edition of The Road to the Temple with her own introduction—Ben-Zvi's well-argued counternarrative helps us see the story from different angles, an opportunity denied to those with access to just one standard biography.The biography also contributes to create a fuller picture of the Provincetown Players. Among the objectives that Ben-Zvi outlines in her preface is the amendment of previous chronicles of that group. Notably, Ben-Zvi demythologizes the role that Glaspell played in “discovering” O'Neill, represented in The Road to the Temple as a young playwright with a trunk full of plays whose reading of Bound East for Cardiff in July 1916, at Glaspell's invitation, left everyone breathless. Ben-Zvi mentions two other significant versions: Hutchins Hapgood's and Harry Kemp's. These accounts require further elaboration. According to Kemp, O'Neill was initially rejected by the Players, after he had sent them a collection of his works and the script of The Movie Man. Only then did O'Neill take a copy of Bound East for Cardiff to one of the Players' meetings and read it aloud himself. As regards Hapgood's version, Ben-Zvi mentions that Neith Boyce “urged Jig to produce” Bound East for Cardiff (171), but she ignores Hapgood's longer account in A Victorian in the Modern World (1939), which claims that O'Neill gave a copy of the play to Hapgood and Boyce before he read it to the group and that Boyce felt so fascinated by the play that she said to Cook, “we have got to do this play” before anyone else had heard of it (396). Amending an error can sometimes lead to another one, in this case, the denial of Boyce's rightful role in the Players and as a catalyst for O'Neill's career with the group.A third significant version is missing from Ben-Zvi's amendment: Barbara Gelb and Arthur Gelb's in O'Neill: Life with Monte Cristo, according to which O'Neill himself says he entered the Provincetown Players' circle at the invitation of Jack Reed. Equally driven by art and testosterone, O'Neill came to Provincetown following the steps of Louise Bryant, Reed's girlfriend at that time, with whom O'Neill would have a relationship that very summer on the Provincetown dunes. Surely later studies on the Provincetown Players, such as Jeffery Kennedy's forthcoming history, will shed more light on this issue and others. No history, and not even one's own history, will ever be definite.Fifteen years after its publication, Susan Glaspell: Her Life and Times remains an inspiring source. What could seem weak spots in this extensive biography nonetheless open new paths for further research. Ben-Zvi invites scholars to build on her research on Cook, and the latter part of the biography enables further work on Glaspell herself. While Ben-Zvi devotes a substantial part to Glaspell's life and work after Greece and after Cook, a deeper study of, for example, Glaspell's work for the Federal Theatre Project seems urgent. Indeed, a stronger case might have been made for her devotion to finding and prompting others to write Midwestern plays and for her continuation of the Provincetown Players project from her FTP Midwestern Play Bureau. Similarly, Ben-Zvi's interspersed literary analyses of some of Glaspell's short stories remind us of the scarcity of work done on this material. Gainor's forthcoming Susan Glaspell in Context for Cambridge University Press will no doubt provide further evidence that many scholars took tips from Ben-Zvi's biography and her many articles and chapters on Glaspell. In her preface, Ben-Zvi lamented that Glaspell “today is virtually unknown” (ix). Thanks in no small part to her work, this is no longer so.