SOURCE: Barranger, Milly S. “Lillian Hellman: Standing in the Minefields.” New Orleans Review 15, no. 1 (spring 1988): 62-68.

In the following essay, Barranger discusses Hellman's influence on later women playwrights.

Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) was a complex individual of great personal and professional courage. Born a Southerner in New Orleans in 1905 on the fringe of the Garden District at 1718 Prytania Street, she migrated between New Orleans and New York for the first sixteen years of her life between the Hellman and Newhouse families.

The environments were diametrical opposites: life in a Prytania Street boardinghouse (at 1718, then 4631 Prytania) run by her father's two unmarried sisters and the “lovely oval rooms” of her maternal grandmother's upper West Side Manhattan apartment in New York City.¹ Her itinerant girlhood—described by her biographer, William Wright—finally settled upon the Northeast out of professional and personal interests. Nevertheless, her artistic roots remained for the most part...