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The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman
Bloomsbury Press
April 2012
On Sale: April 24, 2012
448 pages
ISBN: 1596913630
EAN: 9781596913639
Kindle: B00745YTVU
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
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. A Difficut Woman is a
major work of literary and intellectual history. This will
be one of the most reviewed, and most acclaimed, books of 2012.
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