Lillian Hellman Summary

Lillian Florence Hellman (1906-1984), American playwright, wrote a series of powerful, realistic plays that made her one of America's major dramatists. She explored highly controversial themes, with m... Read more

Like many other playwrights of the 1930s, Lillian Hellman urged a social conscience on the theatre. By her own admission, she is a moralist who cannot avoid the final "summing up," with the sometimes ... Read more

Critical Essay by Marvin Felheim Probably no play of the American theater (and I am including that feeble adaptation The Wisteria Trees) is more completely Chekhovian than Lillian Hellman's &#... Read more

Critical Essay by David Hunt [Scoundrel Time] is the story of the 67 minutes that [Lillian Hellman] spent before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in Washington in May 1952, of what prece... Read more

Critical Essay by Robert Towers The central figure of ["Maybe," a] strange short memoir (if it can be called such), is not its ostensible subject, Sarah Cameron, nor the memoirist, Lill... Read more

Critical Essay by Pam Bromberg Maybe is a more resonant, coherent, and ambitious work than its scattered narrative at first suggests…. If we look at Maybe as a speculative inquiry into the ... Read more

Critical Essay by Devra Braun It is a strange turn of life that the plays Lillian Hellman wrote in the 1930's and '40's center around the same moral issues as her recent factual ... Read more

Critical Essay by Brina Caplan Three brings together in a single volume An Unfinished Woman (1969), Pentimento (1973), and Scoundrel Time (1976)…. Hellman does not … desire to escape th... Read more

Critical Essay by Vivian Gornick Maybe [the fourth Hellman memoir] is a hundred-page remembrance loosely constructed around a woman called Sarah Cameron whom Hellman never knew intimately, a beautifu... Read more

In the following essay, Brantley examines similarities between Hellman's and Porter's attempts in their respective memoirs to portray themselves in the highly politicized atmosphere in w... Read more

In the following essay, Brown argues that Hellman's dependence on memory rather than factual evidence in her autobiographies helped to transform the genre into a specific literary form. Lill... Read more

In the following essay, Holditch discusses elements of Hellman's life in the South that are reflected in her dramas. It seems strange, to say the least, that the last volume Lillian Hellman ... Read more

In the following essay, Wiles explores Hellman's political plays written from the Depression through the 1940s. Along with many American writers from the generation of the 1930s, our “... Read more