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Carregando... A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellmande Alice Kessler-Harris
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Lillian Hellman was a giant of twentieth-century letters and a groundbreaking figure as one of the most successful female playwrights on Broadway. Yet the author ofThe Little Foxes andToys in the Attic is today remembered more as a toxic, bitter survivor and literary fabulist, the woman of whom Mary McCarthy said, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" InA Difficult Woman, renowned historian Alice Kessler-Harris undertakes a feat few would dare to attempt: a reclamation of a combative, controversial woman who straddled so many political and cultural fault lines of her time. Kessler-Harris renders Hellman's feisty wit and personality in all of its contradictions: as a non-Jewish Jew, a displaced Southerner, a passionate political voice without a party, an artist immersed in commerce, a sexually free woman who scorned much of the women's movement, a loyal friend whose trust was often betrayed, and a writer of memoirs who repeatedly questioned the possibility of achieving truth and doubted her memory. Hellman was a writer whose plays spoke the language of morality yet whose achievements foundered on accusations of mendacity. Above all else, she was a woman who made her way in a man's world. Kessler-Harris has crafted a nuanced life of Hellman, empathetic yet unsparing, that situates her in the varied contexts in which she moved, from New Orleans to Broadway to the hearing room of HUAC.A Difficut Woman is a major work of literary and intellectual history. This will be one of the most reviewed, and most acclaimed, books of 2012. Não foram encontradas descrições de bibliotecas. |
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 Google Books — Carregando...GênerosClassificação decimal de Dewey (CDD)812.52Literature English (North America) American drama 20th Century 1900-1945Classificação da Biblioteca do Congresso dos E.U.A. (LCC)AvaliaçãoMédia: (3.31)
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Hellman was and is considered “difficult” because her public persona was determined, uncompromising, controlling and relentless, but when people met her they were often surprised by her lady-like softness. Her large heart drew friends to her, but her irascibility, especially after her first stroke in 1974, pushed them away. Though publically linked with many liberal political causes in her life, Hellman was not someone to blindly follow a party line. She often found herself in a no man’s land between powerful competing ideologies and worldviews such that even today, more than a quarter century after her death, the mention of her name can unleash a surprising amount of caustic vitriol. Hellman was one of a group of people in the 1930s who thought communism could bring about a more perfect egalitarian democracy. When she finally changed her mind about that, she still believed the extremes of American anti-communism were a greater threat to personal liberty and freedom of speech than communism itself, a viewpoint that offended even liberals like Mary McCarthy and that led to charges from both the left and right that Hellman was a Stalinist. A Difficult Woman is a well-researched and persuasive portrait of a catalytic twentieth century personality. (