Lillian hellman knew how to tell a good story, and she liked to spin her own. So she destroyed old letters, suppressed records and hushed friends. She replaced hard documentation with soulful reminiscences of a Jewish childhood in New Orleans, of coming of age during the Depression and of defending her leftist ideals amid the hysteria of the cold war. Flinty yet glamorous, she was blacklisted in the 1950s because she would not confess to a crime of disloyalty she felt she never committed. In memoirs and anecdotes, Hellman presented herself as she wished to be remembered-the courageous and upright heroine of her own play—and tried to destroy or quash everything else.
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