Lillian Hellman
Lillian Hellman, (b. June 20, 1905,
New Orleans, La., U.S.—d. June 30, 1984,
Vineyard Haven, Martha’s Vineyard,
Mass.), American playwright and
motion-picture screenwriter whose dramas
forcefully attacked injustice,
exploitation, and selfishness.
Hellman attended New York public
schools and New York University and
Columbia University. Her marriage
(1925–32) to the playwright Arthur Kober
ended in divorce. She had already begun
an intimate friendship with the novelist
Dashiell Hammett that would continue
until his death in 1961. In the 1930s,
after working as book reviewer, press
agent, play reader, and Hollywood
scenarist, she began writing plays.
Her dramas exposed some of the
various forms in which evil appears—a
malicious child’s lies about two
schoolteachers (The Children’s Hour,
1934); a ruthless family’s exploitation
of fellow townspeople and of one another
(The Little Foxes, 1939, and Another
Part of the Forest, 1946); and the
irresponsible selfishness of the
Versailles-treaty generation (Watch on
the Rhine, 1941, and The Searching Wind,
1944). Criticized at times for her
doctrinaire views and characters, she
nevertheless kept her characters from
becoming merely social points of view by
writing credible dialogue and creating a
realistic intensity matched by few of
her playwriting contemporaries. These
plays exhibit the tight structure and
occasional overcontrivance of what is
known as the well-made play. In the
1950s she showed her skill in handling
the more subtle structure of Chekhovian
drama (The Autumn Garden, 1951) and in
translating and adapting (Jean Anouilh’s
The Lark, 1955, and Voltaire’s Candide,
1957, in a musical version). She
returned to the well-made play with Toys
in the Attic (1960), which was followed
by another adaptation, My Mother, My
Father, and Me (1963; from Burt
Blechman’s novel How Much?). She also
edited Anton Chekhov’s Selected Letters
(1955) and a collection of stories and
short novels, The Big Knockover (1966),
by Hammett.
Her reminiscences, begun in An
Unfinished Woman (1969), were continued
in Pentimento (1973) and Maybe (1980).
After their publication, certain
fabrications were brought to light,
notably her reporting in Pentimento of a
personal relationship with a courageous
woman she called Julia. The woman on
whose actions Hellman’s story was based
denied acquaintance with the author.
Hellman, a longtime supporter of
leftist causes, detailed in Scoundrel
Time (1976) her troubles and those of
her friends with the House Un-American
Activities Committee hearings during the
1950s. Hellman refused to give the
committee the names of people who had
associations with the Communist Party;
she was subsequently blacklisted though
not held in contempt of Congress.
Her collected plays, many of which
continued to be performed at the turn of
the 20th century, were published in
1972.
