Everything you need to understand or teach
Watch on the Rhine by Lillian Hellman.
Products may contain comprehensive summaries, analysis, notes, articles, essays,
lesson plans and more. See below for details on what is included.
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
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 ...
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
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...
Read more
Critical Essay by John Simon
Hellman strikes me as one of the most overrated writers in American history, and this 1941 opus [the recently revived Watch on the Rhine] has aged not as works of the imag...
Read more
Critical Essay by Brendan Gill
["Watch on the Rhine"] is still charged with meaning; the moral and political questions with which it deals continue to torment us…. [Surely we] go ...
Read more
In the following essay, Patraka discusses “how gender is thematized” in Watch on the Rhine.
To historicize a drama means understanding it in its changing socio-historical context and acc...
Read more
Lillian Florence Hellman
Lillian Hellman
Lillian (Florence) Hellman
Critical Essay by John Simon
