This volume includes twenty-six conversations with Lillian Hellman,
ranging from early newspaper interviews on the occasions of the Broadway
openings of her plays through extended talks with her which appears in
the Paris Review, Esquire, and Rolling Stone, down to her last
interviews in the early 1980s.
In all these interviews, Miss Hellman gives her own account of her
eventful and exciting life, her evaluations and analyses of her plays
and accounts of how and why they came to be written. Throughout, her
views are expressed with the pungency, directness, honesty, and wit
which made Lillian Hellman such a universally admired and respected
figure.
Hellman was seldom far from where the action was. The controversies in
which she was involved are equaled only by the honors she received. This
volume supplements her own memories by providing her own account of her
life as she lived it--rather than from the vantage of the late 1960s and
1970s when she composed the mem