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The Lives of Lillian Hellman

About Lillian Hellman
December 30, 2001

Lillian
Hellman
Writer
(Jun 20, 1905 -
Jun 30, 1984)

KNOWN FOR
The plays The
Childrens Hour,
Little Foxes

AMERICAN
MASTERS FILM She became a writer at a time when writers were celebrities and
The Lives of their recklessness was admirable. Like Fitzgerald, Hemingway,
Lillian Hellman
(Jun 1999) Faulkner, and Hammett, Lillian Hellman was a smoker, a drinker, a
Directed by Philip lover, and a fighter. Hellman maintained a social and political life as
Schopper
large and restless as her talent. While her plays were a constant
challenge to injustice, her memoirs were personal accounts of the
Explore more from exciting and turbulent life behind the art.
this episode
About Lillian Born in New Orleans, Louisiana in 1905, Hellman saw her young life
Hellman
populated by eccentric and avaricious relatives, who later appeared
only thinly disguised in her plays. Moving back and forth between
New Orleans and New York as a child, Hellman witnessed the
diverse cultures within her national borders. A er graduating from
high school, she briefly attended both Columbia University and New
York University. Leaving school, she found a job at a publishing
house, where she got her first glimpse of the bohemian lifestyle of

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the 1920s writer and artist. She married one of these young writers,
Arthur Kober, and with him moved to Hollywood.

By the early 1930s, Hellman had found a job as a reader for MGM.
Though she found the work dull, it provided her the opportunity to
meet a wider range of creative people and to become involved in
the artistic and political scene of the times. An ardent le ist,
Hellman organized her fellow readers into a union. It was through
these political actions that she first met the writer Dashiell
Hammett. By 1932 Hellman was already divorced, and her new
relationship with Hammett was well under way. Though o en rocky,
Hellman and Hammetts relationship remained close until
Hammetts death in 1961.

At the prompting of Hammett, Hellman took her first leap into

professional writing with a play about two teachers accused of
being lesbians by a privileged student. Overwhelmed by the
accusation, one teacher kills herself. The Childrens Hour, was a
gripping emotional tale about the abuse of power and its e ects.
The play was an enormous hit on Broadway (running for more than
seven hundred performances), and brought the young playwright
instant recognition. She followed it soon a er with In Days To
Come (1936) and The Little Foxes (1939). The Little Foxes was a
story about three siblings struggling for control over a family
business. Primarily an indictment of capitalist motives, it was also a
telling story of three individuals, and an investigation of their inner
lives. This ability to blend strong politics with humane (though not
sentimental) stories of individual struggles was one of Hellmans
great achievements.

Throughout the 1940s and 1950s she continued to write plays and
increase her political activism. Her anti-fascist works Watch the
Rhine (1941) and The Searching Wind (1944) directly criticized
Americas failures to address and fight Hitler and Mussolini in their
early years. Blacklisted in the 1950s for her le ist activism, Hellman
continued to write and to speak out against the injustices around
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her. By the early 1960s, however, Hellman started to move away

from drama and concentrated on writing her memoirs. Excited over
recent student activism, Hellman began teaching. Throughout the
rest of her life she would teach at a number of colleges, including
both Harvard and Yale.

In 1969 Hellman published AN UNFINISHED WOMAN, the first of

three memoirs that dealt with her social, political, and artistic life.
Followed four years later by PENTIMENTO: A BOOK OF PORTRAITS
and in 1976 by SCOUNDREL TIME, these books were a moving
investigation of the life of a strong, successful woman the life of a
woman who stood against an unjust government and was able to
maintain her dignity and artistic vision. Though criticized for
inaccuracies, these books were influential not only for their
depiction of an exceptional and exciting artistic time, but for their
tone, which many associated with the beginnings of the feminist
movement.

On June 30, 1984 Lillian Hellman died in Marthas Vineyard,

Massachusetts at the age of seventy-nine. Among the many honors
she received were two New York Drama Critics Circle Awards, a Gold
Medal from the Academy of Arts and Letters for Distinguished
Achievement in the Theater, and a National Book Award for AN
UNFINISHED WOMAN. As a teacher and scholar she was well
respected, and her political involvement was integral in the fight
against fascism at home and abroad. Lillian Hellman will be
remembered not only as an activist, playwright, and memoirist, but
as a woman who could overcome the hurdles of her time and
succeed on her own terms.

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