Until she was 16, Lillian Hellman lived half of her time in the South New Orleans, Louisiana, where she was born in 1906 and half in New York City. Once she married and began her career as a writer, she never returned to the South, which housed the rapacious immorality she denounced in The Little Foxes, its "prequel," Another Part of the Forest, and Toys in the Attic. Nor did she reserve her harsh moralizing for the South most of her plays attack universal moral faults. Hellman's repulsion against the profiteering of people like the Hubbard family of The Little Foxes perhaps began as she listened to the scheming of her mother's side of her family, the Marxs. They were a wealthy and elegant family who had risen from immigrant poverty to make their fortune in merchandising in the South, and who later succeeded in banking. Hellman is...