Lillian Hellman, American playwright, screenwriter and memoirist, was a leading voice in American theater and she wrote 12 plays in her lifetime. She is famous and most well-known for her debut, The Children's Hour. Her plays often carry messages that are easy to understand.
Earlier Years of Lillian Hellman
Lillian Florence Hellman was born on June 20, 1905 in New Orleans, Louisiana, to a Jewish family. She was an only child who spent half of every year in New York City and the other half back in Louisiana at a boarding house run by her aunts. Many of the characters in her work — like Toys in the Attic — are based on family members.
With the encouragement of her longtime partner and crime novelist, Dashiell Hammett, Hellman wrote her first and one of her most successful plays, The Children's Hour, in which girls at a boarding school spread gossip about their teachers. As it broached a tale of slander in a lesbian theme, it shocked audiences at the time. It opened when Hellman was 29 and ran on Broadway for nearly 700 performances. Some of her other plays were also quite long-running.
In 1937, Hellman went to Paris and met Ernest Hemingway and other American writers who were living there. As Adolf Hitler had risen to power in Germany, Hellman helped smuggle $50,000 over the border for a group who wanted to oust him. She hid the money in a large box of candy.
Hellman's Memoirs and Later Years
After 1960 Hellman wrote her memoirs in four books, beginning with An Unfinished Woman. In this book, she examines how love, politics and art shaped her life, in particular, her longtime relationship with Dashiell Hammett.
Her popular book Pentimento became a blockbuster movie titled Julia, starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa Redgrave. Inspired by her own experiences, the story is about a childhood friend who convinced Hellman to carry $50,000 into then Nazi Berlin to ransom a political prisoner.
By 1952, America had become very worried about the spread of communism. Hellman, along with other creative people, was called before a government committee and asked if she was a communist during the McCarthy Era. Although she denied that she was a communist, she admitted that she sympathized with some communist beliefs. She later wrote about this experience in Scoundrel Time. Lillian Hellman died at the age of 79, ten days after her birthday on June 30, 1984.
Books by Lillian Hellman
- The Children's Hour, 1934
- The Little Foxes, 1939
- Watch on the Rhine, 1941
- The Searching Wind, 1944
- Another Part of the Forest, 1946
- The Autumn Garden, 1951
- Toys in the Attic, 1960
- An unfinished Woman, 1969
- Pentimento, 1973
- Soundrel Time, 1976
Sources:
- Goring, Rosemary, Ed. Larousse Dictionary of Writers. New York: Larousse, 1994.
- McGovern, Una, Ed. Chambers Biographical Dictionary. Edinburgh: Chambers Harrap Publishers, 2002.
- Ousby, Ian. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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