Hallie Flanagan (1889–1969)

Hallie Flanagan, née Ferguson, was born in Redfield, South Dakota. Her father’s search for work during a period of economic depression at that time in the USA moved her family around the Midwest for much of her childhood. In 1900, the Fergusons settled in Grinnell, Iowa.
The Colonial Theatre was built in Grinnell when Hallie was a teenager, and she immediately fell in love with the dramatic arts. Her father began to organize home talent shows for which Hallie wrote and directed her own scripts. In 1911, she graduated from Grinnell College, where she majored in philosophy and German. As an undergraduate, she wrote short stories and was elected class poet. There she also met her first husband, Murray Flanagan, with whom she would have two children. After his death in 1919, Hallie began teaching high school English in order to support herself and her children, and eventually landed a position teaching freshman English at Grinnell. She began writing plays and had her first major production at the Colonial Theatre. Her play The Curtain won a prize and helped her gain admittance to George Pierce Baker's famous 47 Workshop for playwrights at Harvard University. In 1924, she earned an master's degree from Radcliffe College and later became a professor there. When she joined the faculty at Vassar College, she founded and directed the Vassar Experimental Theatre. She also traveled the world to study new and different kinds of theater, and wrote a book about her experiences called Shifting Scenes of the Modern European Theater (1928). Prof. Flanagan took a leave of absence from Vassar from 1935 to 1942 to serve as the director of the Federal Theatre Project. It was a unique effort in American history during the Great Depression. For it, she hired 12,500 people across 28 states who staged more than 1,000 productions throughout the USA. She wrote about it in Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre (1940). In 1942, Prof. Flanagan became dean of Smith College and a professor and later chair of its Theater Department. She also wrote and directed productions put on at the college, retiring in 1955.

Her most famous play was Can You Hear Their Voices? (1931).