Watch on the Rhine Summary
Lillian Hellman

Everything you need to understand or teach Watch on the Rhine by Lillian Hellman.

Watch on the Rhine Summary & Study Guide
3 Literature Criticisms
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Watch on the Rhine Summary

After a critically acclaimed opening at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York in 1941, Watch on the Rhine ran for 378 performances. Pamela Monaco, in her article on Lillian Hellman for the Dictionary of Literary Biography, notes that the play's appearance at this historical moment, eight months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, responded to "the political climate of the day," entering into "the continuing debate on American neutrality." She concludes that Americans...

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Study Pack

The Watch on the Rhine Study Pack contains:

Watch on the Rhine Study Guide

Introduction

Author Biography

Plot Summary

Characters

Themes

Style

Criticism

Adaptations

Topics for Further Study

Compare and Contrast

Further Study

Bibliography

Lillian Hellman Biographies (4)

Lillian Florence Hellman

550 words, approx. 2 pages

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 m... Read more

Lillian (Florence) Hellman

13,698 words, approx. 46 pages

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 ... Read more

Lillian (Florence) Hellman

12,395 words, approx. 42 pages

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 play... Read more

Lillian Hellman

4,528 words, approx. 16 pages

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 ... Read more