In the following excerpt from his review The Little Foxes, Atkinson calls the play "a deliberate exercise in malice," and asserts that "Miss Hellman has made an adult horror-play. Her little foxes are wolves that eat their own kind."

As drama critic for the New York Times from 1925 to 1960, Atkinson was one of the most influential reviewers in America

As a theatrical story-teller Lillian Hellman is biting and expert. In The Little Foxes, which was acted at the National last evening, she thrusts a bitter story straight to the bottom of a bitter play. As compared with The Children's Hour, which was her first notable play, The Little Foxes will have to take second rank. For it is a deliberate exercise in malice melodramatic rather than tragic, none too fastidious in its manipulation of the stage and presided over by a Pinero frown of fustian morality. But...