 | |
| Editor | Dorothy Gallagher |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | non-fiction, biography |
| Published | 2014 (Yale University Press) |
| Media type | Print (hardback, paperback) |
| Pages | 224 |
| ISBN | 9780300164978 |
| OCLC | 865109879 |
Lillian Hellman: An Imperious Life is a 2014 book by Dorothy Gallagher. It is a critical biography of the American playwright and writer Lillian Hellman.
The New York Journal of Books gave a critical review of Lillian Hellman writing "it seems like a professional hit job." and, although acknowledging that Gallagher "is convincing" over the controversy of Hellman's "Julia", concluded "It seems, indeed, that author Gallagher and her subject share more in common when it comes to the art of subterfuge." [1] The Library Journal was also critical, highlighting, amongst other things, Gallagher's apparent selective sourcing, her emphasis on Hellman's "less admiral aspects" and that "Hellman's testimony at the McCarthy hearings is presented as more self-preserving than principled." [2] It advised reading "instead Deborah Martinson's Lillian Hellman: A Life with Foxes." [2]
Other reviews were less critical, with Choice writing " Drawing on four full-scale biographies as well as Hellman's three memoirs, this is a concise and useful overview of a tumultuous life. .. Highly recommended." and Booklist wrote "Gallagher pounces on and decisively dissects the choicest bits in Hellman's colorful and contrary life of artistic excellence and blinkered radicalism, self-mythologizing and egregious lies, creating a fast-flowing, deeply provocative portrait of a seductive, truculent, and audacious literary powerhouse." [2]
Lillian Hellman has also been reviewed by Publishers Weekly , [3] Pasatiempo, [4] The New York Times , [5] the Jewish Book Council, [6] and Kirkus Reviews . [7]
An autobiography, sometimes informally called an autobio, is a self-written account of one's own life. The word "autobiography" was first used deprecatingly by William Taylor in 1797 in the English periodical The Monthly Review, when he suggested the word as a hybrid, but condemned it as "pedantic". However, its next recorded use was in its present sense, by Robert Southey in 1809. Despite only being named early in the nineteenth century, first-person autobiographical writing originates in antiquity. Roy Pascal differentiates autobiography from the periodic self-reflective mode of journal or diary writing by noting that "[autobiography] is a review of a life from a particular moment in time, while the diary, however reflective it may be, moves through a series of moments in time". Autobiography thus takes stock of the autobiographer's life from the moment of composition. While biographers generally rely on a wide variety of documents and viewpoints, autobiography may be based entirely on the writer's memory. The memoir form is closely associated with autobiography but it tends, as Pascal claims, to focus less on the self and more on others during the autobiographer's review of their own life.
Julia is a 1977 American Holocaust drama film directed by Fred Zinnemann, from a screenplay by Alvin Sargent. It is based on a chapter from Lillian Hellman's 1973 book Pentimento about the author's relationship with a lifelong friend, Julia, who fought against the Nazis in the years prior to World War II. The film stars Jane Fonda, Vanessa Redgrave, Jason Robards, Hal Holbrook, Rosemary Murphy, Maximilian Schell and Meryl Streep.
Lillian Florence Hellman was an American playwright, prose writer, memoirist and screenwriter known for her success on Broadway, as well as her communist sympathies and political activism. She was blacklisted after her appearance before the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–1952. Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the American film industry caused a drop in her income. Many praised Hellman for refusing to answer questions by HUAC, but others believed, despite her denial, that she had belonged to the Communist Party.
Mary Therese McCarthy was an American novelist, critic and political activist, best known for her novel The Group, her marriage to critic Edmund Wilson, and her storied feud with playwright Lillian Hellman. McCarthy was the winner of the Horizon Prize in 1949, and was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships in 1949 and 1959. She was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy in Rome. In 1973, she delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, the Netherlands, under the title Can There Be a Gothic Literature? The same year she was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She won the National Medal for Literature and the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1984. McCarthy held honorary degrees from Bard, Bowdoin, Colby, Smith College, Syracuse University, the University of Maine at Orono, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Hull.
William Connor Wright Jr. was an American author, editor and playwright. He is best known for his non fiction writing covering a wildly divergent list of subjects: from the April in Paris Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria to genetics and behavior to true crime and grand opera.
Invincible Louisa is a biography by Cornelia Meigs that won the Newbery Medal and the Lewis Carroll Shelf Award. It retells the life of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women.
The Spanish Earth is a 1937 anti-fascist film made during the Spanish Civil War in support of the democratically elected Republicans, whose forces included a wide range from the political left like communists, socialists, anarchists, to moderates like centrists, and liberalist elements. The film was directed by Joris Ivens, written by John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway, narrated by Orson Welles and re-recorded by Hemingway, with music composed by Marc Blitzstein and arranged by Virgil Thomson.
Dorothy Hale was an American socialite and aspiring actress. She died after jumping off a building in New York City. Her husband's death, followed by several unsuccessful relationships, left her financially dependent on her wealthy friends. The artist Frida Kahlo, commissioned by Clare Boothe Luce, created a famous painting based on her death, titled The Suicide of Dorothy Hale.
Obama: From Promise to Power is a 2007 political biography, written by David Mendell, of Barack Obama from his childhood to the announcement of his candidacy for president of the United States. The book focuses on Obama's fast rise from obscurity to the national stage, portraying it not as an unplanned phenomenon but rather as the result of a carefully crafted and calculated plan by an ambitious man. Mendell, a Chicago Tribune reporter, had covered Obama since the beginning of his campaign for the U.S. Senate in Illinois. The book utilizes both first-hand research and a wide range of interviews with Obama's aides, mentors, political adversaries, and family.
Marion Meade is an American biographer and novelist. She is best known for her portraits of literary figures and iconic filmmakers.
Van Morrison: No Surrender is a biography of musician Van Morrison, written by Johnny Rogan. It was first published in 2005 by Secker & Warburg, and another edition was published by Vintage Books in 2006. Rogan interviewed musicians and friends of Morrison, and spent 20 years researching the book and four years writing it. The book is comprehensive, and goes into detail about multiple facets of Morrison's life. Rogan recounts Morrison's youth in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and how early experiences there informed his music. He discusses how Morrison joined various bands before experiencing success with Them. Morrison later signed a contract with Bert Berns and moved to New York, where he became quite popular after recording "Brown Eyed Girl" and albums Astral Weeks and Moondance. Rogan comments on Morrison's exploration of spirituality, and describes how these experiences influenced his musical work. The biography discusses Morrison's move to Britain and then Dublin, and his relationship with model Michelle Rocca.
Olivia Shakespear was a British novelist, playwright, and patron of the arts. She wrote six books that are described as "marriage problem" novels. Her works sold poorly, sometimes only a few hundred copies. Her last novel, Uncle Hilary, is considered her magnum opus. She wrote two plays in collaboration with Florence Farr.
Remodeling Her Husband is a 1920 American silent comedy film that marked the only time Lillian Gish directed a film.
Stravinsky's Lunch (1999) is a biography by Australian author Drusilla Modjeska. It won the ALS Gold Medal and the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards for Non-Fiction, both in 2000.
Raising Demons is a "domestic memoir" by American author Shirley Jackson. It was first published in 1957, as a follow-up to her first memoir, Life Among the Savages. The book was reissued in 2015 by Penguin.
Madonnaland: And Other Detours in Fame and Fandom is a non-fiction book written by American essayist and musician Alina Simone. It is a biography of American singer Madonna, as well the author's own analysis of music and pop culture. Upon its release on March 3, 2016 by University of Texas Press, Madonnaland received positive reviews from critics, who praised her writing and bold subject choice. Rolling Stone magazine listed it as one of the 10 Best Music Books released in 2016.
How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories is a 2001 book by Dorothy Gallagher. It is a collection of stories about Gallagher's family in Ukraine and New York City.
Frances Spatz Leighton was an American author, ghostwriter, and journalist. She ghostwrote several memoirs and accounts of Washington D. C. life, writing over 30 books, including My Thirty Years Backstairs at the White House (1961) and My Life with Jacqueline Kennedy (1969). She was born in Ohio and attended Ohio State University, but did not graduate. Leighton soon moved to Washington, D.C., where she worked as a journalist for several publications, including The American Weekly. She ghostwrote her first memoir in 1957, of a chef for the President of the United States.
Jewish Lives is a biography series published by Yale University Press and the Leon D. Black Foundation. It was founded in 2006 and the first book was published in 2010.
Dorothy Gallagher is an American memoirist and biographer known for her two biographies All the Right Enemies, her biography on Italian-American anarchist Carlo Tresca and a 1988 New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and Lillian Hellman: An Imperious Life a critical biography of writer and playwright Lilian Hellman. She is also known for her memoirs Hannah's Daughters, How I Came into My Inheritance, Strangers in the House, and Stories I Forgot to Tell You, which memorializes her marriage to Ben Sonnenberg.
Unafraid to question Hellman's idealized memoirs, Gallagher (Hannah's Daughters) meets the "unflaggingly famous" dramatist head on in this pithy biography. .. If Gallagher places an undue focus on Hellman's "lack of beauty" but "very active sexual life," she also struggles to maintain a line of critical distance from Hellman that reveals the author's investment in the "dogmatic, irritable, mean, jealous, self-righteous, angry" subject, a dance that mirrors Hellman's own two-step with fact and truth.
It's an engaging, readable, gossipy, bitchy hatchet job.
This biography will be appreciated mainly by readers who already dislike its subject and are eager to have their opinion confirmed. .. Some biographers of authors exaggerate the mark their subjects left on their craft and their times. Gallagher reduces Hellman's to little more than a splotch of muck.
In one slim volume, with a few carefully chosen examples, Gallagher manages to reduce an enormous cultural icon-a larger-than-life, scoundrel-fighting literary warrior-to sadly mortal proportions, a talented woman driven by self justification who ended in self-delusion. There's nothing even-handed about Gallagher's account, but it certainly balances out Hellman's own propaganda.
The author has no personal ax to grind against her subject, as do many of the sources she quotes, but her portrait is all the more devastating since it seems so matter-of-fact. .. Less a conventional biography than a critical appraisal of the subject's character, career and contradictions—not likely to add any luster to Hellman's tarnished reputation.