Her years in the Midwest influenced her work. Her last three novels increasingly focused on the region, family life, and theistic questions. They included The Morning is Near Us (1939), Norma Ashe (1942), and Judd Rankin's Daughter (1945). Susan Glaspell died of viral pneumonia in Provincetown on July 28, 1948. Legacy Glaspell was highly regarded in her time, and was well known as a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright. Her short stories were regularly printed in the era's top periodicals, and her New York Times obituary states that she was "one of the nation's most widely-read novelists." In 1940 a new generation of influential Broadway-based critics began publishing derogatory reviews of her plays, having a sizable effect on her long-term standing. Exacerbating the issue was Glaspell's reluctance to seek publicity and her tendency to downplay her own accomplishments, perhaps a result of her modest Midwestern upbringing. In addition, Glaspell's idealistic novels of strong and independent female protagonists were less popular in the post-war era, which stressed female domesticity. Her novels fell out of print after her death. Accordingly, in the United States her work was seriously neglected for many years. Internationally, she received some attention by scholars, who were primarily interested in her more experimental work from the Provincetown years. In the late 1970s feminist critics began to reevaluate Glaspell's career, and interest in her work has grown steadily ever since. In the early 21st century, Glaspell scholarship is a "burgeoning" field. Several book-length biographies and analyses of her writing have been published by university presses since the late 20th century. After nearly a century of being out of print, a large portion of her work has been republished. With major achievements in drama, novel, and short fiction, Glaspell is often cited as a "prime example" of an overlooked female writer deserving canonization. Perhaps the originator of modern American theater, Glaspell has been called "the First Lady of American Drama" and "the Mother of American Drama." In 2003 the International Susan Glaspell Society was founded, with the aim of promoting "the recognition of Susan Glaspell as a major American dramatist and fiction writer." Her plays are frequently performed by college and university theater departments, but she has become more widely known for her often-anthologized works: the one-act play Trifles, and its short-story adaptation, "A Jury of Her Peers". Since the late 20th century, these two pieces have become staples of theatre and Women's Studies curricula across the United States and the world. Recent productions In 1996 the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, London, began a long association with the plays of Susan Glaspell. Auriol Smith directed The Verge in 1996, one of the first of many plays by the American playwright to be performed at the theatre. The Mint Theater in New York City produced Alison's House in 1999 under the direction of Linda Ames Key. The Metropolitan Playhouse, a New York resident theater dedicated to exploring and re-vitalizing American literature and culture, staged Inheritors in 2005; the production was directed by Yvonne Opffer Conybeare. In his 2008 programmed note for Inheritors, Orange Tree director Sam Walters wrote:In 1996... I felt we had rediscovered a really important writer. Now, whenever I talk to American students, which I do quite often, I try my 'Glaspell test'. I simply ask them if they have heard of her, and almost always none of them have. Then I mention Trifles, and some realize they have heard of that much-anthologized short play. So even in her own country she is shamefully neglected. And when I type Glaspell on my computer it always wants to change it to