LILLIAN HELLMAN, HAPPY BELATED BIRTHDAY
(June 20, 1905 - June 30, 1984)

She was truly an American playwright whose breadth of character delineation and importance of theme transcend both North and South. . .whose work was at the cutting edge of America's social consciousness.
    Elizabeth J. Natalle,  Notable Women in American Theatre

She was conscious of her role in the adult power games she witnessed as a child and early on developed a rebellious and independent spirit. Her sense of morality and justice and her fierce independence pervade all her work; she is often compared to Henrik Ibsen as a champion of social and political causes.

During her seven year marriage to theatre press agent Arthur Kober, she wrote book reviews for the New York Herald Tribune, read playscripts for Herman Shumlin and wrote some short stories.  In 1929 she thought of studying in Bonn, Germany, but was repelled by evident anti-semitism; the experience helped to shape a political attitude that later surfaced in her two war plays: Watch on the Rhine (1941) and
The Searching Wind (1944).  In 1930 she and her husband went to Hollywood where he was a scriptwriter and she was a reader for MGM.  Not loving her job at MGM or Hollywood, she was able to meet and enjoy the company of S. J. Perelman and his wife Laura, William Faulkner and
Nathaniel West.   It was also in a Hollywood restaurant that she met Dashiell Hammett, thirteen years her senior, a famous mystery writer. He became her lifelong companion and one of the greatest influences on her life.

     His influence on her work began with The Children's Hour. He had recommended that she read William Roughead's Bad Companions, which contained a story entitled Closed Doors: or, The Great Drunsheugh Case.  The story centered on a troublesome child in a boarding school who maliciously tells her wealthy patron  aunt that her two teachers are lesbians.  The teachers bring a libel suit against the aunt, but they lose the case, and their careers are utterly ruined.    Hellman completed the manuscript in 1934. Herman Shumlin agreed to direct the play.   It opened at the Maxine Elliott Theatre on Broadway that year and ran for 691 performances, the longest run of her twelve stage plays.

In 1937 and 1938 she wrote nine drafts of The Little Foxes and considered it her most difficult play to write.  Dashiell Hammett didn't approve of the script until the eighth draft.   This play is semi- autobiographical because it directly criticizes members of her mother's family who she characterizes as the ruthless Hubbards.   Opening at the National Theatre in New York on Feb. 15, 1939, it ran for 410 performances.  Tallulah Bankhead starred as Regina Hubbard. Bette Davis played the role in the film adaptation.  George Jean Nathan, reviewing the play, wrote that Hellman "indicates a dramatic mind, an eye to character, a fundamental strength, and a complete and unremitting integrity that are rare among her native playwriting sex."

Watch on the Rhine (1941) ran for 278 performances and won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award.  In 1942 a special edition of the play with a foreword by Dorothy Parker, Hellman's close friend, was published to raise funds for the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee.  
     She wrote a prequel to The Little Foxes about the Hubbard family twenty years earlier to give them the back story that motivated their cruelty.  Another Part of the Forest opened in 1947 and ran for 191 performances.   Through her politically motivated activities such as attending the Cultural and Scientific Conference on World Peace, she was labeled by the American press as a pro-Communist sympathizer.
The years 1951 through 1953 were difficult in her personal life. Dashiell Hammett was jailed for six months for contempt of court in connection with questioning on the Civil Rights Congress, considered a pro-Communist organization.  She was subpoenaed in 1952 to appear before HUAC. Her famous response to Committee Chair John S. Wood was typical of her spirit:  "I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."   She was blacklisted, forced to sell her farm in New York, lost revenue from screen royalties, and suffered economically for some time.

Toys in the Attic, directed by Arthur Penn, opened at the Hudson Theatre on Feb. 25, 1960. It too won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and ran for 556 performances.  Praised by the critics, it is set in New Orleans and concerns the the sexual and economic interests of a family in the decaying southern culture.

Hellman published An Unfinished Woman, the first of three popular memoirs, which won the National Book Award.  Her second memoir was Pentimento: A Book of Portraits, and in 1976 Scoundrel Time was published.

After she died, much of her $4,000,000 estate was placed in two funds: one named after Dashiell Hammett to promote writing from a leftist, radical viewpoint and the other named after herself to promote "educational, literary or scientific purposes and to aid writers regardless of their national origin, age, sex or political beliefs."