Hellman, Lillian (Vol. 8) - Hellman, Lillian 1906–
Hellman, Lillian 1906–
American playwright, screenwriter, and director, Hellman has also published three highly successful memoirs. Hellman's plays and memoirs are characterized by a scrupulous diction, an economy of language, and an objectivity that consistently rejects sentimentality. (See also CLC, Vols. 2, 4, and Contemporary Authors, Vols. 13-16, rev. ed.)
Pentimento deals mainly with people other than its author, but there is still a good deal of Lillian Hellman in it—possibly more than she intended—and it's hard not to think of the book as finishing off An Unfinished Woman, a memoir which was inundated with laurels but left at least one reader doubting its widely proclaimed first-rateness. Meaty details about Dorothy Parker, Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald and Dashiell Hammett were not quite compensation enough for a garrulous pseudo-taciturnity—distinction of style, it seemed to me, was precisely the quality...
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