Lillian_Hellman

Lillian Hellman Lillian Hellman Lillian Hellman was born in 1906 and was the only child of a shoe merchant and a woman from Alabama. Her father’s job required her to spend half of the year in New York and the other half in New Orleans. These two different locations gave her a taste of two different worlds throughout her childhood. These two worlds are very often merged in her plays. New York showed her a money conscious world of her grandmother whose Sunday dinners resembled corporation meetings and New Orleans represented the fluttery spinsters and black servants. (Dick, 1) She always knew she was going to be a writer ever since she was little and began to keep a journal. She realized “that an adolescent’s firsthand judgment was preferable to the tortured queries of old age.”(Dick, 1) Normally you would not expect Hellman to write for theater but she did not have skill for detail that fiction requires. In many of her plays the plot is based on an object such as a pen knife (Days to Come), a medicine bottle (The Little Foxes), a briefcase (Watch on the Rhine), and a bracelet plays, hellman, time, hellman’s, very, play, new, lillian, characters, about, two, story, first, writing, skill, scoundrel, problems, out, one, great, different, book, york, wrote, works, work, topic, successful, seems, people, orleans, little, government, garden, focused