Lillian Hellman Biography and List of Works

American playwright and memoirist, who had a lifelong relationship with the mystery writer Dashiell Hammett. Hellman was active on the political left. Many of the characters in her works were based on her own family members. Despite writing only 12 plays, Hellman was a leading voice in American theatre.

"There are people who eat earth and eat all the people on it like in the Bible with the locusts. And other people who stand around and watch them eat."
(from The Little Foxes, 1939)

Lillian Hellman was born in New Orleans to Julia (Newhouse) Hellman, who came from Alabama, and Max B. Hellman, from New Orleans. She moved with her family to New York at the age of five, and while still a child spent half of every year in New York City and the other half back in Louisiana at a boarding house run by her aunts. Hellman studied at New York University (1922-24) and Columbia University (1924) without completing a degree. She began her writing career by reviewing books for the New York Herald Tribune (1925-1928) and published short stories in the magazine The Paris Comet. From 1930 she read scripts for MGM in Hollywood. Her marriage (1925-32) with the playwright and press agent Arthur Kober ended in divorce, and she returned to New York. By that time she had already started an intimate friendship with Hammett that would continue until his death 1961. Hellman was the inspiration for Hammett's Nora Charles, the loyal wife of the detective hero Nick Charles. In real life, Hellman had several affairs during the decades she was close with Hammett, among others with John Melby, whom she met in Moscow in the 1940s.

"We met when I was twenty-four years old and he was thirty-six in a restaurant in Hollywood. The five-day drunk had left the wonderful face looking rumpled, and the very tall thin figure was tired and sagged. We talked of T.S. Eliot, although I no longer remember what we said, and then went and sat in his car and talked at each other and over each other until it was daylight. We were to meet again a few days later, and, after that, on and sometimes off again for the rest of his life and thirty years of mine."
(Hellman's foreword in The Dashiell Hammett Story Omnibus, 1962)

In 1929 Hellman made a trip to Europe. As a playwright she gained first stage success with THE CHILDREN'S HOUR (1934), in which a spoiled child attacks her teachers through a destructive gossip. Originally the story was based on a law case, which Hellman found from a book by William Roughead. The case took place in Edinburgh in the nineteenth century, and was about two old-maid schoolteachers, and a little girl, who brought charges of lesbianism against the two teachers. Despite its controversial themes, the play ran on Broadway for nearly 700 performances. Hellman became involved in a number of Hollywood projects, which softened the failure of DAYS TO COME (1936). The play, THE LITTLE FOXES (1939), Hellman's best-known work , drew its subject from a labour strike in a Midwestern town. The chronicle of hatred and greed of the members of the Hubbard family was partly based on her own memories of the South.

With earnings from The Little Foxes, Hellman purchased a farm in Westchester County, New York. Later she moved to Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, but kept an apartment in Manhattan. In 1936-37 Hellman travelled in Europe, where a wave of anti-Semitism and fascism swept through the countries. She met Ernest Hemingway and other American writers living in Paris, visited Spain, witnessed there the horrors of the civil war, and travelled in the Soviet Union. To this period Hellman returned in her first memoir AN UNFINISHED WOMAN (1969), but according to her biographer William Wright (in Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman, 1986), she fictionalised much of her adventures. Hellman's political sympathies had turned to the left, and in her antifascist play WATCH ON THE RHINE (1941) Hellman criticized the naiveté of the Americans. Hellman helped to smuggle $50,000 over the border for a group who wanted to oust Hitler.

From the mid-1930s Hellman was irregularly involved in liberal and leftist activities and organizations. However, she later asserted that she never joined the Communist Party. Like Sartre in France, Hellman was not among the first intellectuals to condemn the Soviet system - George Orwell's and Arthur Koestler's opinions about Communism had changed already in the 1930s. Later Hellman sympathized with dissidents writers of the Eastern block in the Cold War Era. During World War II Hellman worked in Hollywood adapting her plays for the screen. She wrote the screenplay for THE NORTH STAR (1943), which glorified the heroism of the Russian people in the war against the Germans. She did not sympathize with the Finns in the Winter War between Finland and the Soviet Union (1939-40).

"When I first went out to Hollywood one heard talk from writers about whoring. But you are not tempted to whore unless you want to be a whore."
(Lillian Hellman in Playwrights at Work, ed. by George Plimton, 2000)

In 1952 Hellman was called to appear before the House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities. America had at that time became very worried about the spread of Communism. She refused to reveal the names of associates and friends in the theatre who might have Communist associations, but she wasn't charged with contempt of Congress. In a letter to the Committee she wrote: "But to hurt innocent people whom I knew many years ago in order to save myself is, to me, inhuman and indecent and dishonourable. I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group..."

Hellman was blacklisted from the late 1940s to the 1960s. When her income virtually disappeared, she sold her home. In the 1950s Hellman adapted works from other writers for the stage, among them Jean Anouilh's play L'Alouette about Joan of Arc, and Voltaire's satire Candide, with music by Leonard Bernstein, and lyrics by Richard Wilbur, John Latouche and Dorothy Parker.

In the 1960s Hellman began teaching and writing her memoir trilogy. She gained success with the play TOYS IN THE ATTIC (1960), a portrait of a Southern man obsessed with grandiose dreams. Her autobiographical works include An Unfinished Woman, in which she describes her childhood in New Orleans, years in Hollywood, and relationship with Hammett, and PENTIMENTO (1973), dealing with her youth and early days in New York. The most popular section of the book, focusing on her friend Julia, who was trapped by the Nazis, became the basis for the 1977 film adaptation. In SCOUNDREL TIME (1976) Hellman returned to the 1950s, when she was called to testify on Un-American Activities.

Hellman was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and taught writing classes at the University of New York, Yale University, Harvard University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The National Institute of Arts and Letters presented her with the Gold Medal for Drama in 1964, and in 1976 she was awarded the MacDowell Medal. Hellman died on June 30, 1984.Before her death, Hellman had suffered from poor eyesight, but she managed to publish, in 1980, a little novel entitled MAYBE, about the elusiveness of truth of the past, and in 1984 appeared EATING TOGETHER: RECIPES AND RECOLLECTIONS. Her life has inspired several biographers and even Hellman's part-time housekeeper for one summer, Rosemary Mahoney, has published her recollections of the author. "She always had the final word," Mahoney wrote in A Likely Story (1998), whom she saw as "a sea turtle at rest on the ocean floor, dreaming and digesting ..."

The Little Foxes (1939) - set in the South in 1900. Brothers Ben and Oscar Hubbard plan to establish a mill in their town and need $75 000 for the venture. They ask help from their sister Regina Giddens, who is married to Horace, the president of the local bank. Horace, who has only a short time to live, refuses to become involved. Oscar's son Leo, working at the bank, steals bonds to help his father. Horace discovers the theft but will not prosecute the brothers. He makes a new will in which Regina will receive only the exact amount of the theft. Horace dies and Regina blackmails her brothers into assigning her a 75 percent interest in the mill. Alexandra, her daughter, discovers her mother's treachery and greed, and leaves her home forever. - Hellman returned to the Hubard family history later in the play Another Part of the Forest (1946), which was set in Alabama in 1880.

For further reading: Playwrights at Work, ed. by George Plimto, (2000); Ex-Friends: Falling Out With Allen Ginsberg, Lionel & Diana Trilling, Lillian Hellman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer by Robert P. Newman (1999); A Likely Story by Rosemary Mahoney (1998); Lillian Hellman by Barbara Lee Horn (1998); The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank by Ralp Melnick (1997); Lillian Hellman: Rebel Playwright by Ruth Turk (1995); The Cold War Romance of Lillian Hellman and John Melby by R.P. Newman (1989); Critical Essays on Lillian Hellman, ed. by M.W. Estrin (1989); Lilly: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman by P.S. Feibleman (1988); Lillian Hellman: Her Legacy and Her Legend by C.E. Rollyson (1988); Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman by W. Wright (1986); Hellman in Hollywood by B.F. Dick (1982); Lillian Hellman by K. Lederer (1979); Contributions of Women: Theatre by A. Dillon and C. Bix (1978); Lillian Hellman by D.V. Falk (1978); Lillian Hellman: Playwright by R. Moody (1972); Dramatic Soundings by J. Gassner (1968); Catalogue of the Lillian Hellman Collection by M. Triesch (1967); The Lillian Hellman Collection at the University of Texas by M. Triesch (1966)

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR, (1934)