SOURCE: Barranger, Milly S. “Lillian Hellman: Standing in the Minefields.” New Orleans Review 15, no. 1 (spring 1988): 62-68.

Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) was a complex individual of great personal and professional courage. Born a Southerner in New Orleans in 1905 on the fringe of the Garden District at 1718 Prytania Street, she migrated between New Orleans and New York for the first sixteen years of her life between the Hellman and Newhouse families.

The environments were diametrical opposites: life in a Prytania Street boardinghouse (at 1718, then 4631 Prytania) run by her father's two unmarried sisters and the “lovely oval rooms” of her maternal grandmother's upper West Side Manhattan apartment in New York City.¹ Her itinerant girlhood—described by her biographer, William Wright—finally settled upon the Northeast out of professional and personal interests. Nevertheless, her artistic roots remained for the most part with the Alabama Newhouse merchant/banking families and the colorful Hellman relatives in New Orleans and were realized over thirty years later in her four major plays about the South.

In her adulthood, after her marriage to screenwriter Arthur Kober failed, she resided in New York, Los Angeles, Connecticut, and on Martha's Vineyard, living a liberated lifestyle exceptional for a woman of her generation, and practicing liberal politics that took her as a journalist to Spain in 1937, to the Russian front in 1944, and to the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities in 1952, where she enunciated the line about not cutting her conscience to fit this year's fashions, for which she is most quoted today.²

In the closing months of Lillian Hellman's life (she died on June 30, 1984), playwright Marsha Norman—author of the Pulitzer prize-winning 'night, Mother—became the spokesperson for the influences of Hellman upon the new generation of American women writers. While Hellman claimed interest in the women's movement (and viewed the movement as a battle for economic equality), her considerable accomplishments as playwright and author truly cleared a pathway for others to follow.³ In an early interview Hellman, referred to by a journalist as one of the country's leading “female” playwrights, snapped, “I am a playwright. You wouldn't refer to Eugene O'Neill as one of America's foremost male playwrights” (Wright 98). While Hellman did not view the world in feminist terms, she was aware of male condescension in a profession where women, if they did write commercial plays, wrote largely comedies or romances. She, in turn, undertook the tough, serious themes for which she would become most notable.

In writing about the Hellman legacy, Norman said, “Writers like Lillian Hellman, who are willing to share their lives as well as their work, make it possible for those who come after them to survive.”⁴ In an unrelated interview with critic Mel Gussow in 1983, Norman used a powerful metaphor for the relationship of women playwrights to their art and profession which is applicable to Hellman's life and career. Norman is quoted as saying:

I almost see us as this battalion, marching, valiant soldiers on the front lines, and we must not step on the mines. We are trying as best we can to clear the path, to tell you what's out there.⁵

This paper explores Lillian Hellman's leadership for three decades in the professional theatre for those women, such as Carson McCullers, Marsha Norman and Beth Henley, who were to follow her in that most difficult career of the professional playwright. Her Southern literary heritage, in particular the New Orleans milieu, as manifested in four of her most important plays is likewise explored here.

In The History of Southern Literature, Jacob H. Adler names Lillian Hellman as one of three important Southern dramatists who have given American drama a special eminence; Paul Green and Tennessee Williams are the other two playwrights cited.⁶ Hellman's Southern roots are well-documented in her two memoirs—An Unfinished Woman (1969) and Pentimento (1973)—in Conversations with Lillian Hellman (1986), and in the biography by William Wright titled Lillian Hellman: The Woman Who Made the Legend (1986).

Her Southern heritage came first from New Orleans and Alabama Jewish families. Unlike her contemporary Clifford Odets, there is little in her plays directly reflecting this ethnic background. Also, unlike many Southern writers, her career began and ended with the New York literary and theatrical establishment. After desultory attendance at Columbia and New York Universities, Hellman settled into jobs of manuscript reading for the prestigious publishing house Boni and Liveright and playreading for Broadway producer and director Herman Shumlin. She had a brief marriage with Arthur Kober, and, upon meeting novelist Dashiell Hammett, she maintained an off-again, on-again relationship until his death in 1960, thirty-one years later.

Two significant factors must be mentioned. In the 1930s Lillian Hellman entered the chic New York intellectual set where she met her life-long friend Dorothy Parker, and she labored in the male-dominated vineyard of the Broadway theatre to be a produced (and highly successful) playwright. There was no alternative to Broadway for Lillian Hellman as there is today in the non-profit, professional regional theatres. From her first play, written in 1934 to her last play, written in 1963, Lillian Hellman literally stood for twenty-nine years in the “minefields” of a life lived in the explosive landscape of the liberal politics of her day and the conservatism of the commercial theatre where she wanted to make her mark. In this posture she wrote a body of melodramatic plays (eight original plays and four adaptations). Many of her theatrical effects and themes on the evils of money, power, political and sexual repression shocked audiences who, nevertheless, flocked to see The Children's Hour (1934) for 691 performances, The Little Foxes (1939) for 410 performances, Watch on The Rhine (1941) for 378 performances, Another Part of the Forest (1946) for 182 performances, The Autumn Garden (1951) for 101 performances, and Toys in the Attic (1960) for 556 performances.

By the 1960s Hellman had become disillusioned with the Broadway theatre where she had labored for three decades. As she explained her loss of interest, she cited the Broadway Theatre as an increasing question of money: “I didn't want to live in a world where one was a wild success one minute and a wild failure the next and it seldom depended upon the worth of what one was doing” (Conversations 163). While the corpus of her dramatic work is small in comparison to Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, of her eight original plays, four are commonly identified as her “Southern” plays. Together with Tennessee Williams and Carson McCullers, she pioneered the current renascence in Southern drama most evident today in the works of Marsha Norman and Beth Henley.

Let us consider the distinguishing marks of Southern life and culture transposed into the theatre in these four remarkable plays about the South, only one of which is set in New Orleans: The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, The Autumn Garden, and Toys in the Attic.⁷

In answer to the question “What is a Southern writer?” the editors of The Literature of the South assert that genuinely Southern writers usually show an awareness of Southern ties and cannot throw them off if they would. Moreover, while Southern writers may live in later years outside the area, they will continue to draw upon a fund of Southern materials in their writing.⁸ Hellman confirmed this insight in an interview when she said: “Well, I have no right to, because the New York years now far outweigh the Southern years, but I suppose most Southerners, people who grew up in the South, still consider themselves Southern” (Conversations 186). Further defining the Southern literary tradition, Cleanth Brooks suggests that the Southerner has “… a belief in human imperfection, and a genuine and never wavering disbelief in [human] perfection …” (History of Southern Literature 263). Furthermore, as Brooks indicates, the Southerner has a profound sense of living in a fallen, imperfect world; hence, Southern writers—novelists, poets and playwrights—know that human beings are fallible and are, therefore, more tolerant as observers and recorders of human foibles and imperfections. Consequently, when Southern playwrights depict suicide, murder, cruetly, grotesque characters, and family histories, they are writing in a regional literary tradition one hundred and fifty years old. In terms of the American theatre and conventions of Southern drama, Lillian Hellman stood in the 1930s in the vanguard in giving definition to the drama of the South.

While The Children's Hour—produced on Broadway eleven years before Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie—appears to have no Southern ties, it was remarkable in its day for bringing to Broadway taboo subject matter and for depicting the perverse evil of the public denunciation of two individuals accused of a lesbian relationship. Moreover, the play's ending in suicide and crippling guilt affirms the playwright's concerns for human imperfection and for the destructive power of slander, pervasive themes in novels and plays written about the South by William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, William Styron, and Walker Percy.

The Little Foxes (the first of what was planned as a trilogy but never completed) was Hellman's first explicitly Southern play in which she pioneered aspects of the Southern dramatic tradition. The center of the play's dramatic universe is the Giddens/Hubbard families coupled with a specificity of place (a small Southern town around 1900), concerns for property and inheritance, rapacious and fragile characters, events of theft and murder, exploitation of the underprivileged (white and black), and the intrusion of industrial technology into a traditionally rural society. Moreover, Hellman writes within the strong Southern tradition of Gothic humor, regional dialect, a fascination with the past (both real and imaginary), and the enactment of taboos (social and sexual). In addition, she develops themes characteristic of Southern writing relative to money, power, greed, property, exploitation, disease, death, and dying.

The Little Foxes concerns the South at the turn of the century and centers on the machinations of the favored few. Ben and Oscar Hubbard and their sister Regina Giddens are beginners in the promotion of the industrialized South—the bringing of the “machine to the cotton, and not the cotton to the machine,” as Ben Hubbard says (159). The Hubbard family's rapacity and cruelty lead to oppression, theft, blackmail, and murder. They are contrasted with helpless, aristocratic gentility (Oscar's wife, Birdie), moral rectitude (Regina's husband, Horace), and with ineffectual adolescent rebellion (Horace and Regina's daughter, Alexandra). None of these individuals is strong enough to cope successfully with the rapacious forces surrounding them. In what is a uniquely Southern viewpoint, Hellman pointedly admires the effective strength and machinations of these imperfect human beings. Ben Hubbard, momentarily out-maneuvered by his sister over the theft of the crucial bonds, says,

… But I'm not discouraged. The century's turning, the world is open. Open for people like you and me. Ready for us, waiting for us. After all this is just the beginning. There are hundreds of Hubbards sitting in rooms like this throughout the country. All their names aren't Hubbard, but they are all Hubbards and they will own this country some day. We'll get along.

(222-23)

What we have here is a typical Hellman paradox stated with humor, subtlety and truth: on the one hand, Ben Hubbard's speech is a tribute to Southern optimism regarding human continuity and endurance; on the other, Hellman's liberal politics condemns an American capitalism which exploits the masses (black as well as white) and implants technology upon an agrarian culture, thus transforming a land, a people, and a way of life.

Hellman's Southern roots are laid bare in this play. The North is viewed as a faraway, inaccessible world, the class differences between the two families is pointed (aristocrat versus merchant), the dialogue sounds Southern in its rhythms, humor and colloquialisms. Blacks are treated as an oppressed, serving class and poor whites as an exploitable labor force for the future cotton mills. Hellman's treatment of the black retainers in Regina's household is reminiscent of the portraits of Dilsey in William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury (1929), of Berenice Sadie Brown in Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding (1946), and of her own portrait of Sophronia Mason in An Unfinished Woman (1969). They have moral strength, understanding, and advocate good against evil.

The advent of the European war and Hellman's political liberalism and geographical remoteness from the region of her birth produced a change in her work in the 1940s. She wrote her Washington plays—Watch on the Rhine and The Searching Wind (1944)—which center on the war in Europe. The only explicit connections to The Little Foxes and her Southern heritage are the family as centerpiece, compassion for the world's oppressed, and a sustained humor and optimism despite gross human imperfection. Hellman's belief that human goodness can overcome the “little foxes that spoil the vines” was part of her Southern heritage and her liberal politics as well. The wealthy family in Watch on the Rhine and their penniless German anti-Nazi son-in-law learn from the evils of the historical moment.

Another Part of the Forest, directed by Hellman on Broadway, is the second of the four Southern plays which returns us to the Hubbard family in 1880, twenty years earlier than the period of The Little Foxes. Hellman, as William Faulkner and Eudora Welty, deals with families in more than one generation and in more than one work, a practice indicative of a particular Southern concern for the continuity of the past in the present. In this play the Hubbard patriarch, Marcus, despite his poor origins, has acquired through unsavory, if not criminal means, money, power and “culture.” Hellman's Southern roots are revealed in the following ways: Marcus, oppressive and unscrupulous, is unaccepted by the town's genteel citizens despite his money and “cultural” interests. We are given specifics of postwar history, the “new” Ku Klux Klan, and the absence of legal rights for blacks in the 1880s. Lavinia, Marcus's wife, like Birdie Hubbard in the earlier play, is one of Hellman's consistent portraits of vulnerable, ineffectual women whose frailty is their protection and their misery. There is something of Hellman's mother, Julia Newhouse Hellman—a genteel, docile, often foolish woman—in both of these characters (Wright 16). Lavinia has compassion for blacks who welcome her to their churches and engage her in their desire to educate their children. As the Hubbard siblings struggle among themselves for money and power at the play's end, Lavinia, mentally unstable but steadfastly determined to begin a school for black children, departs the Hubbard menage with her black companion, thereby foreshadowing the blowing winds of social change.

The Autumn Garden and Toys in the Attic are Hellman's final two Southern plays. In both, there is a specificity of place: a summer resort on the Mississippi Gulf Coast in September 1949 and a middle-class house in need of repair near the river in New Orleans. Both present family and money as centerpieces for action and conflict. Both concern domestic issues, class distinctions, blackmail, lies, fidelity, separation, betrayal, missed opportunities, and loneliness. Hellman spoke of The Autumn Garden as her best and favorite play; she described it as a story about middle age and broken dreams (Conversations 55, 175, 215). In the canon of her work The Autumn Garden introduces the subject of Hellman's characteristic dramaturgy, that is, her affinity for the melodramatic, well-made play tradition popularized by Henrik Ibsen in his plays of social realism. Unlike Tennessee Williams, Hellman did not pioneer in her dramaturgy, though she was an effective craftsman. In the Hubbard plays, her consummate use of the well-made play conventions are found in the symbolic titles, secrets revealed, mysterious bank boxes, hidden envelopes, unresolved endings, plot reversals, clear-cut characters, and highly theatrical moments. The Autumn Garden, however, also reveals the influences of Anton Chekhov on Hellman's dramaturgy, despite Richard Moody's insistence that she had not been reading Chekhov prior to writing The Autumn Garden and the fact that her edition of Chekhov's letters appeared four years later.⁹ Nevertheless, the play is rich in Chekhovian qualities, and Chekhov is a writer of immense influence on other Southern authors, in particular novelist Walker Percy.

The setting of The Autumn Garden is a summer boardinghouse on the Gulf Coast near Pass Christian, Mississippi. Traces of Chekhov's influence are to be found in the gathering of disparate middle-aged people into a central place where they confront individual truths about their lost opportunities and wasted lives with little formal plotting of confrontations and irreversible crises. The characters wander aimlessly through the boardinghouse, all the while laboring to understand their past mistakes and present unhappiness. Hellman's focus is on the loss and gain within interpersonal relationships: the broken dreams, the small illusions, the painful truths. As in almost all of her plays, money—the presence or the absence of it—becomes the catalyst for resolving the play's action. Moreover, the details of boardinghouse life—the endless meals, the small demands, the required services, the intrusive strangers—mirror the New Orleans setting of Hellman's childhood in the Prytania Street boardinghouse and her memories of a Gulf Coast resort as well. In this play, the three generations of the Ellis family (along with Denery, a familiar New Orleans name) replicates the Southern writer's penchant for tracing family histories. Finally, New Orleans is the scene to which most of the characters return at summer's end—a pattern of summer migration among New Orleanians familiar to the youthful Hellman.

Hellman likewise returns to New Orleans as the scene of her next and penultimate play. (She did not write another play after the failure on Broadway of My Mother, My Father and Me in 1963.) Toys in the Attic has New Orleans as its setting, including specifics of ambience, landscape, weather, food, foliage, manners, voodoo rites, violence, as well as references to Galatoire's restaurant, Audubon Park, the Mississippi River, and the waterfront docks.

The references to characters, ambience and minor incidents share a close affinity to details included in the memoir begun by Hellman almost a decade later. Hellman seems to have rummaged through her own personal attic for characters and themes. The play's setting closely approximates the middle-class boardinghouse lives of her New Orleans aunts described in An Unfinished Woman, even including the detail of her eccentric aunt who ate her meals on the front porch steps for two years. The Berniers' middle-class house is described as “a house lived in by poor, clean, orderly people who don't like where they live” (5). In addition, Hellman's childhood memories of New Orleans, its class distinctions, the importance of money, food and manners among its people comprise the warp and woof of the play's fabric.

As in all of Hellman's work, family and money are the catalysts for dramatic interest and conflict. Dashiell Hammett is reputed to have given her the idea that became the plot for Toys in the Attic: a play about a man whose loved ones think they want him to be rich and successful, but who find that they really do not want his success; when he bungles his opportunities and ends up a worse failure than before, they are satisfied (Wright 279). However, in Hellman's terms, Julian Berniers, the ill-fated success story, is reminiscent of her father who married a doting young woman whose wealthy mother set up her son-in-law in a shoe manufacturing business on Canal Street that went bankrupt under his management. Moreover, Max Hellman's two unmarried sisters doted on their only brother. Hellman interweaves her adolescent memories of the Hellman family history with a revision of Hammett's original plot line and constructs a play centered upon the women surrounding Julian's life, their motivations and their part in his hapless fate.

Toys in the Attic in its final version tells the story of two sisters, Anna and Carrie Berniers, who are forty-two and thirty-eight respectively and are employed as office and sales clerks. They have devoted their lives to rearing their younger brother Julian, now thirty-four. Their psychological makeup demands Julian's financial (and emotional) dependence on them, so that his failures as a businessman give meaning to their habituated, unhappy lives. Reflecting upon Hammett's original story line, Hellman said: “… It became to me a man who had a momentary success, brought up by women who certainly had never wanted him to have that minute of success. That wasn't the way they saw him and they ruined it for him. I don't think that is an uncommon situation” (Conversations 103).

It is provocative that Hellman's memory of the favorite city of her youth and the conditions of the Hellman household during her New Orleans years resulted in her selection of New Orleans as the setting for this matriarchal society dominated by Julian's elder sisters (portraits derived from Hellman's aunts, Jenny and Hannah), and by Albertine Prine, his wife's wealthy, elegant and domineering mother (a character present in all of Hellman's plays reminiscent of her maternal grandmother, Sophie Marx Newhouse). The plot turns on the now familiar Hellman leit-motif—the acquiring of money and power—a symbolic sign of Julian's success or failure, his independence or dependence upon women. The plot reversal casts Julian (who bears kinship to Hellman's father) into financial disaster, destroying his hopes, self-esteem and new-found assertiveness. Hellman has embedded the story of three women in this rather undistinguished melodramatic plot composed of secret real estate deals, fortunes won and lost, mysterious telephone calls and trysts, religious epiphanies with diamond rings exchanged for knives, and the betrayal of a deeply-guarded miscegenatious marriage. In the second act, the play turns from Julian's story into the story of three women: Anna and Carrie Berniers and Albertine Prine. Albertine's public acknowledgement of her black lover and Anna's revelation of her sister's sexual feelings for their brother Julian set these two characters apart. Anna, the older sister, forces Carrie to confront her long-repressed feelings for Julian; she says, “Don't you know what's the matter, don't you know? You want him and always have” (Toys 59). However, Carrie is not freed by this revelation. Instead, she engages in further denial and her emotions turn to hatred and destruction under the guise of sibling love and understanding. Rather, the epiphany belongs to Anna, for Carrie in bitterness and hatred manipulates Julian's neurotic young wife, Lily (Hellman's nickname and the name of her great aunt Lily Marx), into betraying the source of his newly-acquired fortune and independence. Aware of her sister's betrayal and consuming hatred, Anna packs her bags to leave a way of life based on self-delusion, deprivation and dependency. At the play's close, she realizes that they have depended upon their brother's failures to give meaning and solace to their existence. Anna Berniers takes up the literal and figurative baggage of her life and starts to exit the New Orleans home of her youth and middle-age. But Hellman, in a consummate dramaturgical moment, freezes these two women of strength, dignity and self-knowledge—Anna Berniers and Albertine Prine—in a tableau that leaves the play's end a question mark.

The scene is the following: Repeating a life-long habit, Carrie is in the kitchen making soup for the injured Julian. (She says, “You always liked a good soup when you didn't feel well” [Toys 81].) Julian is in bed with his child-bride mending his self-esteem. Anna and Albertine are center stage confronting the profound changes in their lives brought about by acquired truth and by the symbolic loss of two men: Albertine's black “chauffeur” (a euphemism for her long-time lover who will leave her if she ever brings her daughter, Julian's wife, home again) and Anna's “child” (a brother who, for her, has passed into adulthood). Hellman does not resolve the futures of these two women at the play's end. What they will do in the strength and self-awareness that separates them now from their weak and destructive kin the audience does not learn. Lillian Hellman provides no answer to the choices of the stronger as they turn emotionally and physically away from life-lies relegated, like toys, to the attic of their lives.

Having examined Hellman's career as a successful Broadway playwright who used her Southern (and New Orleans) heritage in the making of four major American plays, let us return to the larger perspective. Lillian Hellman stood in the minefields of her profession and society for fifty years, first, as a controversial writer and civil libertarian imbued with a sense of justice which was often overridden by an even greater sense of self-preservation (Wright 417-36). In her Southern plays she applied her sense of the moral and the ethical to social injustice and class distinctions, to the evils of ill-used money and power, to self-deception and conscious lies, and to the tragedy of manipulation and personal waste.

Hellman did not consider herself a feminist, but she wrote some of the great roles for actresses in the American theatre (Conversations 136): Regina Giddens, Mary Tilford, Birdie Hubbard, Fanny Farrelly, Constance Tuckerman, Anna Berniers, Albertine Prine. Her portraits of women have their source in her childhood memories of her favorite Hellman aunts, her docile mother and her formidable maternal grandmother. Hannah and Hellman's favorite aunt, Jenny, one dominant and one weak, ran the New Orleans boardinghouse and pampered her father as the Berniers sisters pamper their brother Julian. Her mother, Julia Marx Hellman, was a dreamy, docile woman of genteel elegance who provided the prototypes for such characters as Birdie and Lavinia Hubbard, while her domineering maternal grandmother—Sophie Marx Newhouse—remote, strong, and wealthy, was the inspiration for Regina Giddens. Hellman's women provide a spectrum of modern womanhood. They are weak and strong, foolish and cunning, vulnerable and iron-willed, genteel and malevolent, sensitive and insensitive, married and unmarried, employed and leisured. In her portraits Hellman did not ignore the variety and dilemmas of modern women, even those in a postwar South that was just beginning to encroach upon modern times. Her plays are peopled with women from all venues: clerks, wives, mothers, spinsters, opportunists, landlords, society ladies, secretaries, cooks, heterosexuals, homosexuals, lovers, and poets. Almost as a reward for her rich female characterizations, the Hellman women have been realized on stage by many of the great actresses of our time: Florence Eldridge, Tallulah Bankhead, Lucile Watson, Patricia Neal, Mildred Dunnock, Maureen Stapleton, and Irene Worth.

Lillian Hellman, as her slightly younger contemporaries in the commercial theatre—Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller—casts a large shadow over the history of the modern American theatre. However, the paradox is that, in the words of director Harold Clurman, her spirit was alien to the theatre (Moody xiv). Dashiell Hammett is cited in her memoir as saying about her: “The truth is you don't like the theatre except the times you're in a room by yourself putting the play on paper.”¹⁰ Even though a strong individualist and committed author, Lillian Hellman admitted that she had no talent for collaboration—and the theatre is an art of collaboration, most often among strangers. Not only did Hellman succeed in a profession where she was not altogether comfortable and where few women playwrights of her generation were successful, but she had the courage to take rigorous public stands on social and political issues. As we gain perspective on her gigantic presence in the American theatre, learning of her personal commitment to art and to society from memoirs, interviews and biographies, we can better perceive her signal contribution to the American commercial theatre: her presence.

Lillian Hellman cleared a path through the minefields of politics and art in a profession which is fickle at best, inimical to writers in general, and to women playwrights in particular. Her personal courage and professional determination are seen as signal flames for those following in her path.

Notes

1. William Wright, Lillian Hellman: The Woman Who Made the Legend (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986) 20.

2. Lillian Hellman, Scoundrel Time (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971) 93.

3. Conversations with Lillian Hellman, ed. Jackson R. Bryer (Jackson: Univ. Press of Mississippi, 1986) 204-5.

4. Marsha Norman, “Lillian Hellman's Gift to a Young Playwright,” The New York Times 26 Aug. 1984: 1, 7.

5. Mel Gussow, “Women Playwrights: New Voices in the Theatre,” The New York Times Magazine 1 May 1983: 22-38, 41.

6. Jacob H. Adler, The History of Southern Literature, eds. Louis R. Rubin, Jr. et al. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1985) 436-39.

7. Textual references for Hellman's plays are to Six Plays by Lillian Hellman (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) and Toys in the Attic (New York: Dramatists Play Service, 1960).

8. Thomas D. Young, Lloyd C. Watkins and Richmond C. Beatty, eds., The Literature of the South (Glenview, Ill.: Scott Foresman, 1968) viii.

9. Richard Moody, Lillian Hellman: Playwright (New York: Pegasus, 1972) 227. See also Hellman's “Introduction” to The Selected Letters of Anton Chekov (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1955).

10. An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir (Boston: Little, Brown, 1969) 75. The final volume of Hellman's memoirs is Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973).