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....

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...

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 Lillian Hellman always prided herself on avoiding...

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...