Hellman, Lillian

Hellman, Lillian (1905–84), New York dramatist whose plays include The Children's Hour (1934), a tragedy of a malicious child accusing the owners of her boarding school of lesbianism; Days To Come (1936), about a strike; The Little Foxes (1939), about a reactionary Southern family's struggle to retain wealth and power despite internal feuds and the encroachments of modern society; Watch on the Rhine (1941), about an anti‐Nazi in the U.S., with his American wife, who is forced to murder to fight against Hitlerism; The Searching Wind (1944), about the family of a former U.S. ambassador in wartime Washington and prewar Europe; Another Part of the Forest (1946); The Autumn Garden (1951), about middleaged people trying to recapture a sense of youth; and Toys in the Attic (1960), set in New Orleans and treating the theme of miscegenation. My Mother, My Father and Me (1963) is an adaptation of the novel How Much? by Burt Blechman. She collaborated with Richard Wilbur on the comic opera Candide (1957), based on Voltaire's work. Her memoirs appeared as An Unfinished Woman (1969), emphasizing her personal experiences rather than her literary career; Pentimento (1973), about interesting persons she knew; Scoundrel Time (1976), an account of her experiences and those of friends during the McCarthy era's hunt for “un‐American activities,” all brought together as Three (1979); and Maybe (1980).