SOURCE: Holditch, W. Kenneth. “Another Part of the Country: Lillian Hellman as Southern Playwright.” Southern Quarterly 25, no. 3 (spring 1987): 11-35.

In the following essay, Holditch discusses elements of Hellman's life in the South that are reflected in her dramas.

It seems strange, to say the least, that the last volume Lillian Hellman published before her death was a cookbook. The woman in the kitchen practicing the skills of the gourmet is an image decidedly at odds with that of the strong, independent writer, smoking and drinking with “tough guy” Dashiell Hammett, confronting the House UnAmerican Activities Committee in what may have been her finest moment (“I can't cut my conscience to fit this year's fashion”), hurling sarcastic barbs at a multitude of enemies, and finally, nearly blind and suffering from emphysema, undertaking the rigors of a lawsuit against that other iron-willed and indomitable lady of letters, Mary McCarthy, over...