A difficult woman : the challenging life and times of Lillian Hellman
/ Alice Kessler-Harris
- New York : Bloomsbury Press , 2012.
- 419p. ; 24 cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
In this superb biography of Lillian Hellman (1905-84), Kessler-Harris (R. Gordon Hoxie Professor of American History, Columbia Univ.; Out To Work: A History of Wage-Earning Women in the United States) deftly intertwines the playwright's story with that of a continually changing modern culture. She discusses Hellman's early upbringing, personal relationships with Dashiell Hammett and others, plays (e.g., The Children's Hour; The Little Foxes; Watch on the Rhine) and their backgrounds and subtle moral complexities, controversial political views and trouble during the McCarthy era, and turbulent final years. Kessler-Harris provides in-depth analyses and objective commentary in a seamless, comprehensive biographical portrait-one of an often contradictory individual, at once charming and abrasive, talented and insecure, and an advocate of truth who was also publicly accused of lying. The innovative and defiantly independent Hellman is placed at the heart of a social landscape from the 1920s and the Great Depression through the Cold War, Civil Rights Movement, and beyond.