SOURCE: Kalson, Albert E. Review of Writers in Hollywood, by Ian Hamilton. Modern Fiction Studies 37, no. 2 (summer 1991): 259-61.

In the following review, Kalson offers a scathing assessment of Hamilton's Writers in Hollywood, asserting that it fails to provide new information, insight, or analysis.

Ian Hamilton [in Writers in Hollywood] devotes three pages to determine who put a drunken Dashiell Hammett on a plane back to New York and Lillian Hellman. Was it writer Charlie Brackett or the writing team of Albert Hackett and his wife Frances Goodrich? Maurice Zolotow, author of Billy Wilder in Hollywood, credits Brackett, Hamilton—scrupulous about identifying his many sources—informs us; but Diane Johnson, Hammett's biographer, gives the nod to the Hacketts, Hamilton states. According to another Hammett biographer, Richard Layman, Brackett together with his alcoholic wife played the good Samaritans. There is even some question as to the year—1937 or 1938. Does anyone...