Davenport Group (literature)
Clockwise: Glaspell; Cook; Dell; Ficke
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The Davenport Group is the informal name of a nationally known group of early modernist writers originating from Davenport, Iowa, who migrated east to assume leading roles in several important artistic and cultural developments in the 1910s and 1920s. Core members of the group are Susan Glaspell, George Cram Cook, Floyd Dell, and Arthur Davison Ficke. Other Davenport writers associated with the group include Alice French, Charles Eugene Banks, Nilla Cram Cook, and Harry Hansen.
In the last decades of the nineteenth century Davenport was a prosperous and cosmopolitan port city and center of trade. By 1890 local author Alice French had become the first Iowa writer with a national reputation. In the mid-1890s writer Charles Eugene Banks moved to Davenport from Chicago and started a weekly newspaper devoted to literature and local social life. Over the next decade Banks would mentor several young local aspiring writers (Glaspell, Cook, Dell) who would constitute the Davenport group. Though inspired and influenced by French's success, the socially progressive younger writers rejected her starkly conservative views.
As the young writers began to find success publishing their works, they left Davenport to advance their careers in Chicago and New York. Cook led the founding of the Provincetown Players, the first modern American theatre company, famed for producing the first plays of Eugene O'Neill. Glaspell became a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and "one of America's most widely read novelists" whose short stories were regularly printed in the top periodicals. Dell became a best-selling novelist and leading critic and editor whose influence is seen in many major American writers of the century's first half. Ficke stayed in Davenport longer, becoming a lawyer in his father's firm. While practicing law he was able to establish himself as a nationally appreciated poet. He eventually quit law and followed his friends to New York to focus on writing.
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