Hellman, Lillian

HELLMAN, LILLIAN (1907–1984). When Lillian Hellman met Dashiell Hammett in 1930, she was unknown and he was a famous writer. At the age of twenty-three, she had sold a few short stories to obscure magazines and worked as a press agent and a reader for a publishing house, various theatrical producers, and, concurrently, for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios. Hammett at thirty-six was already started on his final book but finding it difficult to write or to stop drinking.

By 1934, that last book, The Thin Man, was out, but his writing block had grown so severe he never functioned professionally again. Her play The Children’s Hour, about the evil power of slander against two women accused of lesbianism, was banned in several cities but was a Broadway hit, and she was on her way to becoming the leading writer of her sex in the English-speaking theater.

By her own testimony, Hammett was not only her love and political mentor but a critical and editorial influence on her plays. A Marxist and professed Communist, he guided her from a loose set of liberal leanings to an understanding of historical materialism and an appreciation of the role of the Soviet Union in the struggle for collective security against Hitlerism. In a sense, the intelligence and energy he had put into creative writing and political activism was diverted into her career as a playwright and celebrity spokesperson for the American Left.

After The Children’s Hour, she wrote Days to Come, a drama about a strike. Then traveling to Spain, she co-wrote Joris Ivens’s movie The Spanish Earth, returning to the United States to campaign for Loyalist aid. The Little Foxes, a drama about southern money and power, was an enormous success. Her most political play, Watch on the Rhine, which treated a German antifascist refugee and his encounter with a middle-class American family, won the New York Drama Circle Critics Award. Among her other works, The Searching Wind treated the appeasement of Hitler before the war. After Hammett’s death in 1961, she wrote only one play, My Mother, My Father and Me.

Instead, she showed her brilliance as a prose writer in the volumes of reminiscence An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, and Scoundrel Time, all based upon real events but reworked for dramatic effect, which Hellman always preferred to the literal truth. Her “Julia” story was rendered into a film starring Jane Fonda. A number of plays were also adapted for films, most notably Watch on the Rhine.

Perhaps her most memorable line was not in any of her plays but in the letter she addressed to the House Committee on Un-American Activities to explain why she would not talk about other people in her testimony. “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

Dick, Bernard F. Hellman in Hollywood. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982.

Kessler-Harris, Alice. A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman. New York: Bloomsbury USA, 2012.

Martinson, Deborah. Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes and Scoundrels. Berkeley, Calif: Counterpoint Press, 2005.

Mellen, Joan. Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett. New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

Rollyson, Carl. Lillian Hellman: Her Legend and Her Legacy. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988.

Turk, Ruth. Lillian Hellman: Rebel Playwright. Minneapolis: Lerner Group, 1995.

Lillian Hellman Papers. Harry Ransom Center. University of Texas at Austin. https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/fasearch/findingAid.cfm?eadid=00398