A difficult woman : the challenging life and times of Lillian Hellman / Alice Kessler-Harris.
Material type: TextPublication details: New York : Bloomsbury Press, 2012.Description: 439 pages : illustrations ; 25 cmISBN:- 9781596913639 (hardback)
- 812/.52 B 22
- PS 3515 .E343 Z74 2012
Item type | Current library | Call number | Status | Date due | Barcode | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
BOOKS | Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library General Stacks | PS 3515 .E343 Z74 2012 (Browse shelf(Opens below)) | Not For Loan | NPML20080040 |
Includes bibliographical references (pages [361]-429) and index.
1. Old-fashioned American traditions -- 2. A tough broad -- 3. A serious playwright -- 4. Politics without fear -- 5. An American Jew -- 6. The writer as moralist -- 7. A self-made woman -- 8. A known communist -- 9. The most dangerous hours -- 10. Liar, liar -- 11. Life after death.
"Lillian Hellman was a giant of twentieth-century letters and a groundbreaking figure as one of the most successful female playwrights on Broadway. Yet the author of The Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic is today remembered more as a toxic, bitter survivor and literary fabulist, the woman of whom Mary McCarthy said, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" In A Difficult Woman, renowned historian Alice Kessler-Harris undertakes a feat few would dare to attempt: a reclamation of a combative, controversial woman who straddled so many political and cultural fault lines of her time. Kessler-Harris renders Hellman's feisty wit and personality in all of its contradictions: as a non-Jewish Jew, a displaced Southerner, a passionate political voice without a party, an artist immersed in commerce, a sexually free woman who scorned much of the women's movement, a loyal friend whose trust was often betrayed, and a writer of memoirs who repeatedly questioned the possibility of achieving truth and doubted her memory. Hellman was a writer whose plays spoke the language of morality yet whose achievements foundered on accusations of mendacity. Above all else, she was a woman who made her way in a man's world. Kessler-Harris has crafted a nuanced life of Hellman, empathetic yet unsparing, that situates her in the varied contexts in which she moved, from New Orleans to Broadway to the hearing room of HUAC [House Un-American Activities Committee]." -- from Amazon.
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