Lillian Hellman

Lillian Florence Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American playwright, prose writer, memoirist, and screenwriter known for her success on Broadway as well as her communist views and political activism. She was blacklisted after her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–1952. Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the U.S. film industry caused a drop in her income. Many praised Hellman for refusing to answer HUAC's questions, but others believed, despite her denial, that she had belonged to the Communist Party.

As a playwright, Hellman had many successes on Broadway, including The Children's Hour, The Little Foxes and its sequel Another Part of the Forest, Watch on the Rhine, The Autumn Garden, and Toys in the Attic. She adapted her semi-autobiographical play The Little Foxes into a screenplay; the movie starred Bette Davis. Hellman was romantically involved with fellow writer and political activist Dashiell Hammett, who also was blacklisted for 10 years.

Beginning in the late 1960s, and continuing to her death, Hellman wrote a series of memoirs of her colorful life and acquaintances. Her accuracy was challenged in 1979 on The Dick Cavett Show, when Mary McCarthy said of Hellman's memoirs that "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'." Hellman sued McCarthy and Cavett for defamation, and during the suit, investigators found errors in Hellman's Pentimento. They said that its "Julia" section, which was the basis for the Oscar-winning 1977 movie of the same name, was actually based on the life of Muriel Gardiner. Martha Gellhorn, one of the most prominent war correspondents of the 20th century and Ernest Hemingway's third wife, said that Hellman's memories of Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War were inaccurate. McCarthy, Gellhorn, and others accused Hellman of lying about her membership in the Communist Party and of being a committed Stalinist.

The defamation suit was unresolved at the time of Hellman's death in 1984; her executors eventually withdrew the complaint.