Purchase
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
Add to Wish List
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.
Comments
No comments posted.
Registered users may leave comments.
Log in or register now!
| 
© 2003-2025 off-the-edge.net
all rights reserved Privacy Policy