Conversations with Lillian Hellman
Conversations with Lillian Hellman
This volume includes twenty-six conversations with Lillian Hellman (1905-1984), ranging from early newspaper interviews on the occasions of the Broadway openings of her plays through extended talks with her which appears in the Paris Review, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, down to her last interviews in the early 1980s.
In all these interviews, Hellman gives her own account of her eventful and exciting life, her evaluations and analyses of her plays and accounts of how and why they came to be written. Throughout, her views are expressed with the pungency, directness, honesty, and wit which made Lillian Hellman such a universally admired and respected figure.
Hellman was seldom far from where the action was. The controversies in which she was involved are equaled only by the honors she received. This volume supplements her own memories by providing her own account of her life as she lived it—rather than from the vantage of the late 1960s and 1970s when she composed the memoirs.
Jackson R. Bryer is professor emeritus of English at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is editor of Conversations with Lillian Hellman and Conversations with Thornton Wilder and coeditor (with Mary C. Hartig) of Conversations with August Wilson and (with Ben Siegel) of Conversations with Neil Simon, all published by University Press of Mississippi.
