Synopses & Reviews
Review
"Considering the range and length of Lillian Hellman's career, it is somewhat surprising that until William Wright's study there has been no major examination of her life. She was, after all, a consummate dramatist, her fame launched with The Children's Hour in 1934. And more than 30 years later, after several failures in the theater, she gained an even broader audience with her best-selling memoirs, An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, and Scoundrel Time. But it was her more volatile, flamboyant side that attracted as much comment, particularly her 30-year relationship with the hard-boiled detective writer Dashiell Hammett and a leftist political bent that found her in Spain during the Civil War, on the Eastern front in 1944 with the Russian army, and in 1952 as a witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Hellman spent much of her later life repeatedly denying she had ever been a Communist or had fabricated many of her European exploits, especially the story of Julia, for whom she supposedly completed a dangerous anti-Nazi mission. She probably was, and she did. Wright's portrait, then, is sometimes hardly flattering, though nonetheless respectful, and serves admirably as the first in a likely string of Hellman biographies." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)