Lillian hellman biography

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The Party’s Over

Lillian Hellman was once a star. She was one of the most successful playwrights of her time, with her first produced work, The Children’s Hour, running for two years on Broadway. As a screenwriter in the s, she earned the top rate of $2, a week to write two films of her choice per year. The three volumes of her memoirs—An Unfinished Woman (), Pentimento (), and Scoundrel Time ()—were best sellers.

Her personal life was equally glamorous. After a brief early marriage, she flitted from romance to romance, courted by everyone from theater producers to diplomats to writers. The last category included Dashiell Hammett, who was the love of her life despite the fact that for most of their thirty-year affair he was married to someone else. She played elegant hostess to literary luminaries at her Upper East Side town house, her upstate New York farm, and her Martha’s Vineyard beach house. In , at age seventy-one, she joined the likes of Raquel Welch and Diana R

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From the New York Times review of Alice Kessler-Harris's biography: "Always the challenger, Hellman did her best to thwart all unsanctioned accounts of her life. She forbade her friends to talk to inquiring writers and destroyed many of her personal letters. Nonetheless, a half-dozen biographies have been published since her death. The best of them fryst vatten Carl Rollyson’s “Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy” (), a critical but astute portrait. Nearly as good are William Wright’s “Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman” — a stouthearted book that did its best with limited sources, having been the first to appear, in — and Joan Mellen’s “Hellman and Hammett” (), an unsparing psychoanalytical examination of Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, her longtime lover and mentor. For day-to-day glimpses of Hellman in her later years, nobody has captured the anger and the humor, the caprice and the stubbornness, the flattery and the bullying, as vividly as her friend Peter Feibleman in “Lilly

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Lillian Hellman

American dramatist and screenwriter (–)

Lillian Hellman
Hellman in
Born	Lillian Florence Hellman ()June 20, New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.
Died	June 30, () (aged&#;79) Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, U.S.
Resting place	Abels Hill Chilmark cemetery, Chilmark, Martha's Vineyard
Occupation	Playwright author screenwriter
Spouse	Arthur Kober &#; &#; (m.&#;; div.&#;)&#;
Partner	Dashiell Hammett (–; Hammett's death)

Lillian Florence Hellman (June 20, – June 30, ) was an American playwright, prose writer, memoirist and screenwriter known for her success on Broadway, as well as her communist views and political activism. She was blacklisted after her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of – Although she continued to work on Broadway in the s, her blacklisting by the American film industry caused a drop in her income. Many prai