Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman

Kessler-Harris examines the life of Lillian Hellman to understand why the bestselling author and playwright is both celebrated and reviled a quarter-century after her death. The rich, predatory Southern family in Hellman’s most famous play, The Little Foxes, echoes her mother’s, and her feeling of being a poor relative fed into a lifelong insecurity even after she achieved success. Accused of being a self-hating Jew and an “unrepentant Stalinist,” Hellman challenged traditional women’s roles in her writing career and sexual liaisons with alcoholic, married Dashiell Hammett and many others, but was skeptical about women’s liberation, refusing to be identified with feminist causes. She died in the midst of a scandalous lawsuit accusing her of stealing the life story of Muriel Gardiner—a WWII resistance fighter— in her memoir Pentimento, the basis for the acclaimed film Julia. By grounding Hellman in the multifaceted, politically splintered America of her time, Columbia history professor Kessler-Harris (Out to Work) wonders if the tempestuous, demanding, often rude and vindictive woman might have been judged differently had she not been female, Jewish, and a displaced Southerner who appealed to middlebrows. Although she perhaps lets Hellman off the hook too much, Kessler-Harris offers a nuanced, fair-minded, and engrossing portrait of a controversial but indelible 20th-century personality. Photos. Agent: Zoë Pagnamenta, Zoë Pagnamenta Agency. (Apr.)