Lillian Hellman was born in New Orleans on June 20, 1906, to businessman Max Bernard and Julia Hellman. Carol MacNicholas, in her article on Hellman in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, notes that while she and her mother had opposite personalities, Hellman's ties to her mother were quite strong and became a focus of some of her work. After her college years at New York University and Columbia University in the early 1920s, Hellman began her literary career as a manuscript reader for Horace Liveright, Inc., a New York City publishing firm. There she met and married press agent Arthur Kober, with whom she moved to Europe, where she wrote short stories. While traveling to Germany, she observed the beginnings of the Nazi movement and its increasingly vocal anti- Semitism, subjects that she would later explore in her plays. In the 1930s, the couple moved to Hollywood, where...