By Nava Atlas | On October 7, 2019 | Updated April 23, 2025 | Comments (3)
Zora Neale Hurston’s third published short story, “Spunk” (1925), helped launch her career as a fiction writer. She had already established herself as an ethnographer and folklorist, having been the first Black student to study anthropology at Columbia University in New York City.
“Spunk” was originally published in the prestigious Opportunity, A Journal of Negro Life, and got Zora’s literary career off to a running start.
“Spunk” won second place in Opportunity’s fiction writing contest that year. At the awards dinner on May 1, 1925, Zora also won second place in the drama category for her play, Color Struck, plus two honorable mentions. These early successes helped assure Zora’s place as a writer in the creative world of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Read More→
By Taylor Jasmine | On July 22, 2019 | Updated February 15, 2020 | Comments (2)
Alice Dunbar-Nelson (1875 – 1935) used her poetry, essays, and short stories to confront complex issues of being a multiracial woman in America. Active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, she grappled with the feeling of non-belonging to one racial community nor the other. “Brass Ankles Speaks” is an essay she wrote, undated, presumably in the early 1900s. It was never published during her lifetime.
Despite her personal struggles, Alice Dunbar-Nelson devoted her life to fighting for social and racial justice and women’s equality not only through her writing, but as an activist and speaker. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On June 12, 2019 | Updated June 13, 2026 | Comments (4)
“The Story of an Hour” by Kate Chopin (1850 – 1904) is a short story that was originally published on December 6, 1894 in Vogue magazine under the title “The Dream of an Hour.”
This story, which appeared in St. Louis Life the following year as “The Story of an Hour,” has been much anthologized and is still studied. Like Chopin’s best-known work, the 1899 novella The Awakening, this story was controversial when it first appeared.
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By Nava Atlas | On June 4, 2019 | Updated May 1, 2025 | Comments (0)
A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell (1876 – 1948), a 1917 short story, is arguably this American author’s most enduring work. Certainly, it’s one of her most anthologized.
This short story was based on Glaspell’s 1916 one-act play, Trifles (you can also read the full text of Trifles here), also a widely anthologized work.
Both Trifles and A Jury of Her Peers were inspired by a true crime story that Glaspell covered as a reporter for theDes Moines Daily News in 1900. Read More→
By Nava Atlas | On May 31, 2019 | Updated January 27, 2026 | Comments (3)
Presented here is the full text of Trifles, a 1916 one-act play by the American author and playwright Susan Glaspell (1876 – 1948), along with a brief theatrical history and plot summary. For your reading convenience, and an ad-free experience, link to the pdf of Trifles here.
This playlet one of Glaspell’s most anthologized works, along with the 1917 short story she based upon this play, A Jury of Her Peers.Trifles was first performed at the Wharf Theater in Provincetown, Massachusetts in August of 1916. The author herself performed as Mrs. Hale, the wife of a neighboring farmer.
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