SOURCE: Grossman, Anita Susan. “Art versus Truth in Autobiography: The Case of Lillian Hellman.” CLIO 14, no. 3 (spring 1985): 289-308.

In the following essay, Grossman examines the common technique of autobiographers and memoirists deliberately dramatizing and occasionally falsifying information for the sake of artistic integrity and the ways Hellman used this method in her own memoirs.

The forthcoming appearance of Lillian Hellman's biography by her longtime editor, William Abrahams, promises to shed some new light on a literary figure who has frequently been a subject of controversy. The outline of her long career which ended in June 1984 is now well known: the years as a successful playwright in the 1930s, beginning with The Children's Hour and continuing with The Little Foxes and Watch on the Rhine; her thirty-year on-again off-again relationship with Dashiell Hammett; her appearance in 1952 before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which led to years of being blacklisted...