Trifles is Susan Glaspell's most well known and most frequently produced play. It was first produced by the Provincetown Players at the Wharf Theatre in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1916. Susan Glaspell (1876-1948) co-founded the Provincetown Players with her husband, George Cram Cook, and was writing and directing plays there at the same time as such prominent figures as Eugene O'Neill and Robert Edmond Jones were beginning their careers there.
Glaspell wrote fourteen plays, nine novels, and fifty short stories in her life, even winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1931 for her final play Allison's House. Several of her novels were bestsellers and she served as director of the Midwest Play Bureau for the short lived Federal Theatre Project. She was indisputably Eugene O'Neill's equal as a writer, her plays even received better reviews by critics than his when they premiered, but while O'Neill has been memorialized as the first great American playwright, Susan Glaspell's work has been largely ignored and forgotten.
The full text of Trifles, as well as three of Glaspell's other plays can be found for free at this link, courtesy of Project Gutenberg.
To find out more about the playwright, visit the Susan Glaspell Society's webpage.