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 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 ima...
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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...
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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 ...
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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 t...
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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 ...
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Lillian Florence Hellman
Lillian Hellman
Lillian (Florence) Hellman
Critical Essay by John Simon
Bitchy, Unconventional Hellman Protected by Loving Biographer
