ABSTRACT
Lillian Florence Hellman was born in New Orleans, Louisiana on June 20, 1905, the daughter of Max Hellman, a shoe salesman, and Julia New- house, an Alabama native whose family had succeeded in several business enterprises, including banking. Hellman was hired in Hollywood as a script reader. Her job was to summarize books that might make good films. Hellman's first two volumes of memoirs, An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento, were an enormous success, garnering her the best reviews of her life. Several of Lillian Heilman's plays The Children's Hour, The Little Foxes, Another Part of the Forest, The Autumn Garden, Toys in the Attic are regularly revived and are likely to remain a part of the American repertory. A leading American playwright and important screenwriter, Hellman published memoirs in the 1960's and 1970's that advanced the growing interest in women's lives and in autobiography.
