Search Results - Hellman, Lillian, 1906-
Lillian Hellman
![Hellman in 1935](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Lillian-Hellman-1935.jpg)
As a playwright, Hellman had many successes on Broadway, including ''The Children's Hour'', ''The Little Foxes'' and its sequel ''Another Part of the Forest'', ''Watch on the Rhine'', ''The Autumn Garden'', and ''Toys in the Attic''. She adapted her semi-autobiographical play ''The Little Foxes'' into a screenplay, which starred Bette Davis. Hellman was romantically involved with fellow writer and political activist Dashiell Hammett, who also was blacklisted for 10 years; the couple never married.
Beginning in the late 1960s, and continuing through to her death, Hellman turned to writing a series of popular memoirs of her colorful life and acquaintances. Hellman's accuracy was challenged in 1979 on ''The Dick Cavett Show'', when Mary McCarthy said of her memoirs that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." Hellman brought a defamation suit against McCarthy and Cavett, and during the suit, investigators found errors in Hellman's ''Pentimento.'' They said that the "Julia" section of ''Pentimento'', which had been the basis for the Oscar-winning 1977 movie of the same name, was actually based on the life of Muriel Gardiner. Martha Gellhorn, one of the most prominent war correspondents of the twentieth century, as well as Ernest Hemingway's third wife, said that Hellman's remembrances of Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War were wrong. McCarthy, Gellhorn and others accused Hellman of lying about her membership in the Communist Party and of being a committed Stalinist.
The defamation suit was unresolved at the time of Hellman's death in 1984; her executors eventually withdrew the complaint. Hellman's modern-day literary reputation rests largely on the plays and screenplays from the first three decades of her career, and not on the memoirs published later in her life. Provided by Wikipedia