What examples of “the big lie” as a theme can you detect in Lillian Hellman’s plays?

What were the implications for Hellman’s writing of her shift in interest away from Henrick Ibsen and toward Anton Chekhov?

Explain how Hellman’s concern about fascism and her play Watch on the Rhine inadvertently helped put Senator Joseph McCarthy on her track.

Hellman was one of a considerable number of authors who were blacklisted as a result of the McCarthy investigations. What effect did this blacklisting have on her subsequent career?

Compare Hellman’s two published memoirs. To what extent is Pentimento an attempt to “finish” An Unfinished Woman? Does she succeed?

In addition to her original stage plays, Lillian Hellman published original screenplays, a collection of the letters of Anton Chekhov, her adaptations of two French plays (Montserrat, L’Alouette) and of an American novel (How Much?), an operetta adapted from Voltaire’s Candide: Ou, L’Optimisme (1759; Candide: Or, All for the Best, 1759; also as Candide: Or, The Optimist, 1762; also as Candide: Or, Optimism, 1947), many uncollected articles, and several volumes of memoirs, the first two of which have received as much acclaim as her best plays.

Lillian Hellman was the most important American follower of Henrik Ibsen after Arthur Miller. Like Ibsen in his middle period, she wrote strong, well-made plays involving significant social issues. Like Ibsen, she created memorable female characters, some strong, some weak. Her most important female character, Regina Giddens of The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest, seems at least partially modeled on Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Both Hellman and Ibsen were exceptional in depicting believable, memorable children. Like him, though more frequently, she used blackmail as a dramatic ploy. Her plays, like Ibsen’s, can be strongly and tightly dramatic, and, like his, some, notably The Little Foxes, have a question ending: That is, one in which the eventual outcome for the major characters is left ironically uncertain.

Her last two original plays, however, recall Chekhov more than Ibsen in their depiction of feckless characters and, in one of the two, an apparent, though only apparent, plotlessness. She has been blamed for her employment of melodramatic plot elements, but her use of them is often valid and essential and does not interfere with accurate character analysis, convincing dramatic dialogue, and adroit handling of social issues. Hellman was, after Tennessee Williams, the most important dramatist writing primarily about the American South. Two of her plays, Watch on the Rhine and Toys in the Attic, won the New York Drama Critics Circle Award. Hellman received many other awards, including the Brandeis University Creative Arts Medal and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Gold Medal.