Adramatist, screenwriter, and political agitator, Lillian Hellman was born in New Orleans in 1906 and became one of the nation's most prominent playwrights. Her best work engages the political and sociological questions of the time, from strike-breaking to the power of a well-wrought lie. Her most famous work, The Little Foxes has sometimes been seen as a socialist drama that offers a scathing critique of American capitalism. Portraying a well-bred Southern family that tears itself apart because of money, Hellman's play delivers an eloquent condemnation of racial and class discrimination, and of the dehumanizing effects of greed.
The New South. The Little Foxes takes place in what is often referred to as "the New South"- ideally, an American South that emerged from the Civil War reborn, free of its rural poverty, its racial prejudices, its economic disparities. In the popular imagination, the South as a region was thought of both before and after the war as a culture of "gracious living, leisure, indolence, 'culture', easy, open manners, noblesse oblige" (Smith, The Rise of Industrial America, p. 829). But the New South was different than the Old: for one, it had to face the most contentious postwar issue, the status of the newly freed slaves.
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