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 many of her plays reflecting her outspoken political an...

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 too obvious explanatory speech at the end of act 3. Of...

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 plays enjoy periodic revivals, however, Hellman's reputati...

Five American editors on a whirlwind tour of German publishing find out what travels and what doesn't American publishers are famous for not translating foreign writers, including some very good ones. A number of overseas book-producing nations have tried to remedy that,...

There were some long faces among the delegates from Journey for Justice, a politically correct organization from Colorado, as they surveyed conditions aboard a floating refugee center. Hoping to refurbish their state's damaged reputation in the wake of an anti-gay amendment, the elected...

On top of her many overlapping sex and love affairs, Lillian Hellman also once got married—and when she did, her biographer Deborah Martinson writes, “As was the custom, she left work to become a full-time housewife.” A stunning line, especially in light of Hellman’s extraordinary...

On top of her many overlapping sex and love affairs, Lillian Hellman also once got married—and when she did, her biographer Deborah Martinson writes, “As was the custom, she left work to become a full-time housewife.” A stunning line, especially in light of Hellman’s...

In the following essay, Patraka discusses “how gender is thematized” in Watch on the Rhine.

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 imagination, but as cars, threshing machines, and other like contraptions, do. (p. 71) Watch on the Rhine would creak in every bone if it had any bones and were not entirely made of the skin of simplistic ideology, the gristle of melodrama, and the grease of facile gags. Yet through it has the black-and-whiteness of melodrama, it does not even...

["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 on asking two of the oldest and most anguished of questions: "Am I my brother's keeper? And if I am, and if this is a good thing, then how evil dare I to become in the name of keeping him?" Miss Hellman has always been a champion of the well-made play, and it's true that one detects in the neat plotting of "...