Lillian Hellman Biography by Kessler Harris Book Review

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Alice Kessler-Harris places the illustrious life of Lillian Hellman into historical and cultural perspective in A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman. The book does not follow Hellman’s life chronologically from her birth to death, but thematically instead. Kessler-Harris almost seems to be using Hellman as a symbol of her times, or a window into how America navigated important changes. As she states in the introduction, “Hellman’s life seems to me to so deeply encapsulate many of the twentieth century’s challenges,” (Kessler-Harris, 2013, p. 4). Feminism and communism play the most important roles in Hellman’s life, as the playwright boldly stood up for the core principles and values that characterized her country.



A Difficult Woman is divided into eleven chapters plus the introduction. The introduction outlines Kessler-Harris’s methodology and approach to the biography. Opening with a bold illustration of Hellman posing for an advertisement at age 71, cigarette dangling from her confident, defiant hand. The photograph does encapsulate the life—and indeed the times—of Lillian Hellman, and provides a solid introduction to the tone and purpose of Kessler-Harris’s (2013) biography. As a historian, Kessler-Harris is most interested in the context of Hellman’s career and her popularity, both as context shaped Hellman’s own writing, and also how her audiences and critics received and reacted to Hellman.

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Also in the introduction, Kessler-Harris discusses her reasoning for adding yet another biography of Lillian Hellman to the already large number of books dedicated to that purpose. Answering this question, Kessler-Harris points out that Hellman has been remembered as being a “difficult woman” largely because she shunned the conventional norms of her time. Finally, the author asserts her ambitious goal of showing how Hellman represents the dichotomies in American culture itself.



After the introduction, the bulk of the book is comprised of what can be considered stand-alone essays, each devoted to a specific subject. “Old Fashioned American Traditions,” Chapter One, sets the stage about the moral climate that characterized New Orleans, where Hellman was from, and the less liberal or progressive parts of the States and particularly in the South. In Chapter 8, “A Known Communist,” Kessler-Harris discusses the widely known fact that Hellman did believe in the core tenets of communism and vehemently fought against McCarthyism in a time when communism was framed as being pitted against American values. Thus, Hellman represented the fight against propaganda….....

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References

Kessler-Harris, A. (2013). A Difficult Woman. New York: Bloomsbury.

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