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...
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She has been called one of the most influential female playwrights of the twentieth century; the voice of social consciousness in American letters; the theatre's intellectual standard-bearer--and yet ...
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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 ...
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At Lillian Hellman's funeral, John Hersey, referring to the title of Hellman's 1969 volume of memoirs, An Unfinished Woman, declared that Hellman was at last a finished woman. Just as some of her play...
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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 &#x...
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Critical Essay by Elizabeth Hardwick
It is nearly always said that Lillian Hellman's plays are triumphs of craftsmanship. Actually the question of motivation, the construction of a plot, are qu...
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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 preced...
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Critical Essay by William F. Buckley, Jr.
[When Scoundrel Time] was first published, in the spring of 1976, only the cooing of reviewers was heard…. Then … then, in The New York Review o...
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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, Lilli...
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Critical Essay by Maggie Scarf
[Monumental] despair is the true subject of Maybe. For Lillian Hellman has gone swimming in the waters of time and memory and found herself adrift in a vast sea of unrel...
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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 natu...
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Critical Essay by Richard Moody
[Few] passages in [Lillian Hellman's] plays have been lifted directly from life. Not because of a sparsity of dramatic incidents in her life, but simply because ...
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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 m...
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Critical Essay by Harold Clurman
Ms. Hellman has certainly written better plays than [the recently revived] Days to Come, yet I found it interesting for a variety of reasons, even for its faults. For ...
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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 the...
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Critical Essay by Anatole Broyard
The kindest interpretation one can put on "Maybe," Lillian Hellman's new book, is that it is a parody of contemporary fiction. Non sequiturs, gra...
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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 beautiful...
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In the following essay, originally published in Dissent in 1976, Howe argues that Hellman's depiction of 1950s America in her memoirs is more mythology than fact.
There are writers with so enti...
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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...
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In the following essay, originally published in Philosophy and Public Policy in 1980, Hook excoriates what he considers Hellman's total misrepresentation of history in her memoir Scoundrel Time...
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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.
Lillian...
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In the following essay, Grossman examines the common technique of autobiographers and memoirists deliberately dramatizing and occasionally falsifying information for the sake of artistic integrity and...
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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 pub...
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In the following essay, Barranger discusses Hellman's influence on later women playwrights.
Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) was a complex individual of great personal and professional courage. Born...
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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 “re...
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In the following essay, Georgoudaki discusses Hellman's portrayal of women in her major plays during the 1930s through 1950s.
During the period from 1930 to 1950 Lillian Hellman wrote six origi...
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Lillian Florence Hellman
Lillian Hellman
Lillian (Florence) Hellman
