SOURCE: Wiles, Timothy J. “Lillian Hellman's American Political Theater: The Thirties and Beyond.” In Critical Essays on Lillian Hellman, edited by Mark W. Estrin, pp. 90-112. Boston: G. K. Hall and Company, 1989.

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 “red decade,”¹ Lillian Hellman addressed the Great Depression in her plays of the period, and reflected on its aftermath and her own political awakening throughout her career. Her analysis of American society is essentially Marxist, since it is based on the primacy of material and economic conditions to explain social relations, and emphasizes environmental conditioning, conflict among classes, and the hope that a new person, socialist man, would be born of the conflict through the dialectical collision of opposites.

Her view of her involvement with actual politics of...