In the following essay, Brantley examines similarities between Hellman's and Porter's attempts in their respective memoirs to portray themselves in the highly politicized atmosphere in which they lived.

In the following essay, Wiles explores Hellman's political plays written from the Depression through the 1940s.

In the following essay, Holditch discusses elements of Hellman's life in the South that are reflected in her dramas.

In the following essay, Grossman examines the common technique of autobiographers and memoirists deliberately dramatizing and occasionally falsifying information for the sake of artistic integrity and the ways Hellman used this method in her own memoirs.

In the following essay, originally published in Philosophy and Public Policy in 1980, Hook excoriates what he considers Hellman's total misrepresentation of history in her memoir Scoundrel Time, in particular her paradoxical vindication of Stalinism and vocal stand against McCarthyism.

In the following essay, Georgoudaki discusses Hellman's portrayal of women in her major plays during the 1930s through 1950s.

In the following essay, Barranger discusses Hellman's influence on later women playwrights.

[Few] passages in [Lillian Hellman's] plays have been lifted directly from life. Not because of a sparsity of dramatic incidents in her life, but simply because her writer's nature did not tolerate such self-indulgence. When she turned to life, she drew from the family circle of her mother and father. Her uncles and aunts on her mother's side had staged exciting and vigorous family battles that had awed and frightened her. Her father's sisters were warm and affectionate, devoted ...

In the following essay, Brown argues that Hellman's dependence on memory rather than factual evidence in her autobiographies helped to transform the genre into a specific literary form.

In the following essay, originally published in Dissent in 1976, Howe argues that Hellman's depiction of 1950s America in her memoirs is more mythology than fact.

Probably no play of the American theater (and I am including that feeble adaptation The Wisteria Trees) is more completely Chekhovian than Lillian Hellman's … most charming original drama, The Autumn Garden. Although the piece was only mildly successful when presented during the 1950–1951 season on Broadway, to the discerning (and here I quote Alan Downer) it is "Miss Hellman's most original play." The Autumn Garden is remarkable for its skill. Miss Hellman herself ...

[When Scoundrel Time] was first published, in the spring of 1976, only the cooing of reviewers was heard…. Then … then, in The New York Review of Books, Murray Kempton interrupted his own paean to Miss Hellman to make a comment or two which, however gentle, quite ruptured the trance. It was as if, in Paris during the occupation, an anonymous arranger had, by fugitive notation, insinuated the motif of the "Marseillaise" into a great Speer-like orchestration of "Uber Alles.&...

It is a strange turn of life that the plays Lillian Hellman wrote in the 1930's and '40's center around the same moral issues as her recent factual memoir of the McCarthy period. The plays were for the most part written many years before McCarthy and the Red Scare were part of Hellman's life or of American life; yet the plays prefigure and parallel the memoir. In her plays, and in Scoundrel Time, the memoir, Hellman formulates and explores the idea that regardless of political an...

Maybe is a more resonant, coherent, and ambitious work than its scattered narrative at first suggests…. If we look at Maybe as a speculative inquiry into the nature of truth and of memory, a way of asking what can we know about another person or our own lives, then Hellman's choice of relatively marginal central figures serves to reinforce her interest in how memory works as well as what it recalls. But Maybe is more than an exercise in epistemology…. Despite, or perhaps because of, the...

The central figure of ["Maybe," a] strange short memoir (if it can be called such), is not its ostensible subject, Sarah Cameron, nor the memoirist, Lillian Hellman, but the elusive, mutilated, often reeling character of memory itself. Again and again Miss Hellman tries to corner memory, forcing it to reveal the truth about the people and events she is trying to make sense of. Important epistemological questions are suggested: How valid is what we know—or think we know—about the ...

Maybe [the fourth Hellman memoir] is a hundred-page remembrance loosely constructed around a woman called Sarah Cameron whom Hellman never knew intimately, a beautiful, indolent Fitzgerald-like playgirl who moved vaguely in all the circles that touched Hellman's life and who showed up periodically over the long decades—at a drunken Hollywood party in the '30s, a restaurant in Paris in the '40s, a hotel in Rome in the '60s. Hellman had some mean encounters with a friend of ...

Three brings together in a single volume An Unfinished Woman (1969), Pentimento (1973), and Scoundrel Time (1976)…. Hellman does not … desire to escape the self through flights of language; indeed, she mistrusts the easy transformations of perspective that prose makes possible. As the titles An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento indicate, her acts of retrospection imply that subjective vision has limits, and that these limits must be acknowledged. The author of Three is to be triply admired: for ...

Ms. Hellman has certainly written better plays than [the recently revived] Days to Come, yet I found it interesting for a variety of reasons, even for its faults. For a start, it is about something real, something that matters. At the time of its original showing, it must have been regarded chiefly as a play about capital and labor, a "strike play." It offers the usual setup of a wealthy, more or less genteel Ohio family, owners of a brush factory; its loyal workers; an upright union leader; t...

[Monumental] despair is the true subject of Maybe. For Lillian Hellman has gone swimming in the waters of time and memory and found herself adrift in a vast sea of unreliability—the shore of solid information, of what is known about the circumstances of the past, seems to recede each time she believes she has the true details in sight. No jetty of certain facts upon which to perch ever makes its appearance; and there is no place from which her own experiences, her own sense of what her life has been,...

The kindest interpretation one can put on "Maybe," Lillian Hellman's new book, is that it is a parody of contemporary fiction. Non sequiturs, gratuitous acts, frustrating ellipses, ambiguities, a dearth of emotion: Miss Hellman avails herself of all these current techniques in telling a story that she keeps telling us may not be a story at all. On every page, sentences begin with I've forgotten, I don't remember, I don't know, I am no longer sure. This encourages us...

It is nearly always said that Lillian Hellman's plays are triumphs of craftsmanship. Actually the question of motivation, the construction of a plot, are quite awkwardly managed in most of them…. The plays are full of thefts and letters discovered. The basic plot device is so often unfortunate that the efforts to work it out, skillful enough in a technical sense, become more and more visible and disturbing. This craftsmanship of climaxes and curtain lines and discoveries is a sort of know-how,...

[Scoundrel Time] is the story of the 67 minutes that [Lillian Hellman] spent before the House Committee on Un-American Activities in Washington in May 1952, of what preceded the hearing, and what its consequences were. (p. 656) It is a moving story that she tells, but it must be said that, with all her skill in writing, it is not very easy reading. She assumes too much knowledge in the reader, and there is too much vagueness about dates and places. She is equally vague on her connection with communism: �...