A short life of the author
Lillian Florence Hellman (20 June 1905 – 30 June 1984) was an American playwright and memoirist who was, for three decades, one of the most powerful women in American theatre and one of the most controversial figures in American intellectual life. Her plays — The Children’s Hour (1934), The Little Foxes (1939), Watch on the Rhine (1941), and Toys in the Attic (1960) — are expertly crafted dramas of moral conflict, family destruction, and political engagement. Her memoirs — An Unfinished Woman (1969), Pentimento (1973), and Scoundrel Time (1976) — are brilliantly written, deeply self-serving, and, in the case of at least one celebrated episode, demonstrably untrue. Her life raises, in the sharpest possible form, the question of what we owe to truth and what we owe to a good story.
Life
Hellman was born in New Orleans and grew up between New Orleans and New York — a divided childhood that gave her an ear for Southern speech and a feel for the dynamics of the wealthy, decaying Southern families that populate her best plays. She attended New York University and Columbia University without completing a degree, worked as a book reviewer and manuscript reader, and married the press agent Arthur Kober in 1925 (they divorced in 1932).
In 1930, she met Dashiell Hammett, the detective novelist and author of The Maltese Falcon. Their relationship — intense, contentious, alcoholic, and enduring — lasted until Hammett’s death in 1961 and was the central fact of Hellman’s emotional life. Hammett encouraged her playwriting and served as her most trusted critic.
The Plays
The Children’s Hour (1934) — about two schoolteachers whose lives are destroyed by a student’s accusation of lesbianism — was a sensation on Broadway: daring in its subject matter, superbly plotted, and morally uncompromising. The play ran for 691 performances and established Hellman as a major dramatist.
The Little Foxes (1939) is her masterpiece — a portrait of the rapacious Hubbard family of the turn-of-the-century South, who will stop at nothing — including, implicitly, murder — to seize control of a cotton mill. The play is a study of greed, family loyalty, and the moral consequences of inaction (the pivotal moment turns on a character’s decision not to act). Tallulah Bankhead starred as the magnificent, terrifying Regina Hubbard; the role has been played subsequently by many of the great actresses of the American theatre.
Watch on the Rhine (1941) is an anti-fascist drama about a German resistance fighter who comes to America with his American wife and is forced to kill an informer. The play won the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award.
Toys in the Attic (1960) returns to the Southern family territory: two spinster sisters in New Orleans whose devotion to their younger brother is possessive, suffocating, and ultimately destructive.
The Memoirs
Hellman’s three memoirs made her, in old age, as famous as her plays had made her in youth. An Unfinished Woman (1969) won the National Book Award. Pentimento (1973) — the title refers to the phenomenon in painting where earlier images show through later layers of paint — contains the famous “Julia” chapter, about Hellman’s friendship with an anti-fascist activist whom she helped smuggle money into Nazi Germany. The chapter was adapted into the film Julia (1977), starring Jane Fonda as Hellman and Vanessa Redgrave as Julia.
Scoundrel Time (1976) is Hellman’s account of the McCarthy era and her own appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1952, where she delivered the famous line: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
The Truth Problem
In 1980, the writer Mary McCarthy said on television that “every word [Hellman] writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.’” Hellman sued McCarthy for libel; the lawsuit was still pending when Hellman died. Subsequent research by scholars — particularly Samuel McCracken and Muriel Gardiner — demonstrated that the “Julia” story was largely fabricated: the real-life events Hellman described had happened to Gardiner, not to Hellman. The discovery permanently damaged Hellman’s reputation as a memoirist, though it did nothing to diminish the quality of her plays.
Critical Standing
Hellman’s plays have fared better than her memoirs in the long reassessment. The Little Foxes and The Children’s Hour remain regularly produced, and their craftsmanship — tight plotting, sharp dialogue, moral complexity expressed through action rather than rhetoric — holds the stage effectively. Her position in the canon of American drama is secure but secondary: she lacks the poetic vision of O’Neill, the verbal brilliance of Albee, and the democratic sweep of Miller. What she possesses, and what distinguishes her from most American playwrights, is an understanding of power — how it operates within families, within economic systems, within political structures — that gives her best work a hardness and an analytical clarity that feel closer to Ibsen than to any American predecessor.
Her political legacy is more troubling. Her Stalinism was genuine and sustained: she visited the Soviet Union repeatedly, refused to condemn the Moscow trials, and maintained positions on the Cold War that placed her well to the left of responsible opinion. That she was courageous before HUAC is beyond question; that her courage was compromised by her willingness to defend or ignore Soviet tyranny is equally clear. She remains one of the most fascinating, most infuriating, and most instructive figures in American intellectual history.
Collecting Hellman
The Children’s Hour (1934, Knopf) in first edition brings $200–$500. The Little Foxes (1939, Random House) brings $100–$300. The memoirs in first edition bring $20–$60 each. Signed copies are uncommon and command premiums. Items signed by both Hellman and Hammett are very valuable.