Lillian Hellman

Playwright

• Born: June 20, 1905
• Birthplace: New Orleans, Louisiana
• Died: June 30, 1984
• Place of death: Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts

Playwright, writer, and activist

Hellman was an award-winning playwright and a vocal political activist. Her brilliantly written autobiographies became best sellers.

Areas of achievement: Activism; literature; theater

Early Life

Lillian Hellman (HEHL-muhn) was born on June 20, 1905, in New Orleans, Louisiana, the only child of Max Bernard Hellman, the self-educated son of German Jewish immigrants, and Julia Newhouse, a member of a wealthy Jewish family from Demopolis, Alabama, who later relocated to New York City. While Max was attempting to set up a shoe-manufacturing business in New Orleans, he took his wife and child to live with his two unmarried sisters, Hannah and Jenny, who ran a boardinghouse at the edge of the exclusive Garden District.

When Lillian Hellman was six, her father’s business failed, and Max moved to New York, where he worked as a salesman. During the years that followed, Hellman and her mother would spend six months of each year in Manhattan and six months in the South, usually at the Hellman sisters’ boardinghouse in New Orleans. Hellman was utterly charmed by New Orleans—the people, the street life, the food. When she later recalled her childhood, Hellman would always mention events that took place in New Orleans.

Hellman attended Public School 6 in New York, then Hunter and Wadleigh high schools. After graduating from Wadleigh in 1921, she entered New York University, but after two years as an unexceptional student, she dropped out to work as a manuscript reader for a publishing firm and later as a theatrical play reader. On December 30, 1925, she married a young writer, Arthur Kober, and went with him to Paris. It was at this time that her first works appeared in print—three formulaic short stories.

After returning from Europe in 1930, the couple went to Hollywood, where Hellman worked for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a scenario reader. It was at this time that she met the writer Dashiell Hammett, who would become her friend, her lover, and her lifelong companion. In 1932, Hellman divorced Kober. Back in New York City, she became a play reader for the producer Harold Shulman. Meanwhile, she had been working on a play, The Children’s Hour, in which a girl’s false accusation of sexual misconduct destroys the lives of two innocent teachers. When she showed her play to Shulman, he was enthusiastic, and, despite its controversial subject matter, he assembled a cast and staged it. The Children’s Hour opened on Broadway November 20, 1934. The play was a success, remaining at the same theater for an unprecedented 691 performances, and Hellman’s career as a playwright was launched.

Life’s Work

Between 1934 and 1961, Hellman wrote thirteen dramatic works, several of which have become classics. Her most famous, The Little Foxes (1939), was set in 1900 and inspired by her wealthy Demopolis relatives, the Hellmans and the Marxes. In The Little Foxes, the Hubbards were portrayed as a greedy, selfish, and totally unprincipled lot. Interestingly, there was no hint that the Hubbards were Jewish, though Hellman had been known to comment that she had no ancestors who were not. Clearly, Hellman wanted the fictional family to represent all the American families obsessed by greed. In her prequel to The Little Foxes, called Another Part of the Forest (1947), which was set twenty years earlier, Hellman showed the Hubbards in the process of becoming soulless materialists, as she believed so many ambitious Americans had late in the nineteenth century.

A visit to Bonn, Germany, in 1929 and another to Spain during the civil war convinced Hellman that the same ruthless greed motivated the various fascist movements. Her antifascist plays include Watch on the Rhine (1941) and The Searching Wind (1944). Hellman’s own battle against fascism began in May, 1952, when she was subpoenaed to appear before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Her longtime companion Hammett was known to be a member of the Communist Party and even served time in prison for refusing to answer questions asked him by the committee. Despite her own Communist sympathies, Hellman was not prosecuted, but she was blacklisted in Hollywood. In her last memoir, Scoundrel Time (1976), Hellman presents her account of the hearing and speculates about the consequences of McCarthyism, which included, she believed, the Vietnam War and Watergate. However, she does admit that she was so enchanted by theoretical communism that she was willfully blind to the fact that in the Soviet Union, under Joseph Stalin, freedom of speech was eliminated and millions of people were tortured and executed, including many Jews.

Among Hellman’s most successful later plays were her brilliant adaptation of French playwright Jean Anouilh’s L’Alouette (1952), the story of Joan of Arc, which Hellman retitled The Lark (1955), and Toys in the Attic (1960), which won the Critics’ Circle award. Her last play, My Mother, My Father, and Me (1961), was merely a collection of satirical sketches.

Hellman’s final works were all memoirs: An Unfinished Woman (1969), which received a National Book Award; Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (1976); Scoundrel Time; and Maybe: A Story (1980). “Julia,” one of the segments in Pentimento, was made into a film in 1977. Biographers remain uncertain as to the accuracy of many details in Hellman’s memoirs. Some passages, it is believed, are more fiction than fact. Hellman died from natural causes on Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, on June 30, 1984. She was seventy-nine.

Significance

Although Hellman is admired for the courage she displayed in her fight against fascism at home and abroad and though she was honored both for her film scripts and for her finely honed autobiographical prose, it is her achievements as a playwright that have earned her a permanent place in literary history. At a time when male writers dominated the Broadway stage, Hellman surmounted gender barriers and produced a series of beautifully crafted plays, none of them alike except in broad thematic emphasis, that all had the memorable characters and compelling action necessary to keep a theater filled night after night. Hellman did much to make the 1930’s and the 1940’s the golden age of American theater.

Bibliography

Austenfeld, Thomas Carl. American Women Writers and the Nazis: Ethics and Politics in Boyle, Porter, Stafford, and Hellman. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Relates Hellman’s social and political views to the main events of the twentieth century. Includes bibliography and index.

Bryer, Jackson R., ed. Conversations with Lillian Hellman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Twenty-six interviews, ranging from conversations with reporters after the Broadway openings of her plays to more formal, later interviews, such as that in the Paris Review. A useful supplement to her memoirs.

Griffin, Alice, and Geraldine Thorsten. Understanding Lillian Hellman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. Includes an overview of Hellman’s career and specific discussions of her works. Includes notes, bibliographical references, and index.

Hellman, Lillian. Three: An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time. Boston: Little, Brown, 1979. The complete memoirs, with commentaries by the author. Photographs.

McGraw, Eliza R. L. Two Covenants: Representations of Southern Jewishness. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Includes extensive references to Hellman, along with more general comments. Includes bibliography and index.

Rollyson, Carl E. Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. One of the major studies of Hellman as a person and as an artist. Includes illustrations, bibliography, and index.