Hellman, Lillian 1906–1984

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Hellman, Lillian 1906–1984

(Lillian Florence Hellman)

PERSONAL: Born June 20, 1906, in New Orleans, LA; died of cardiac arrest June 30, 1984, in Martha's Vineyard, MA; daughter of Max Bernard (a businessman) and Julia (Newhouse) Hellman; married Arthur Kober (a writer), December 30, 1925 (divorced, 1932). Education: Attended New York University, 1922–24, and Columbia University, 1924.

CAREER: Playwright and author. Horace Liveright, Inc. (publisher), New York, NY, manuscript reader, 1924–25; theatrical playreader in New York, NY, 1927–30; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Hollywood, CA, scenario reader, 1930–31; returned to New York, NY, 1932, and worked as part-time playreader for producer Harold Shulman. Taught or conducted seminars in literature and writing at Yale University, 1966, and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University. Director of plays, including Another Part of the Forest, 1946, and Montserrat, 1949. Narrator, Marc Blitzstein Memorial Concert, New York, NY, 1964.

MEMBER: American Academy of Arts and Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences (fellow), Dramatists Guild (member of council), American Federation of Television and Radio Artists.

AWARDS, HONORS: New York Drama Critics Circle Award, 1941, for Watch on the Rhine, and 1960, for Toys in the Attic; Academy Award nominations for best screenplay, Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences, 1941, for The Little Foxes, and 1943, for The North Star; honorary M.A. from Tufts University, 1950; Antoinette Perry ("Tony") Award nominations, 1957, for best book of a musical, for Candide and 1960, for best play, for Toys in the Attic; Brandeis University Creative Arts Medal in Theater, 1960–61; LL.D. from Wheaton College, 1961, Douglass College of Rutgers University, Smith College, and New York University, all 1974, Franklin and Marshall College, 1975, and Columbia University, 1976; Gold Medal for drama, National Institute of Arts and Letters, 1964; National Book Award in Arts and Letters, 1970, for An Unfinished Woman, and nomination, 1974, for Pentimento: A Book of Portraits; elected to Theatre Hall of Fame, 1973; MacDowell Medal, 1976.

WRITINGS:

(Editor and author of introduction) Anton Chekhov, Selected Letters, Farrar, Straus (New York, NY), 1955, reprinted, 1984.

(Editor and author of introduction) Dashiell Hammett, The Big Knockover (selected stories and short novels), Random House (New York, NY), 1966, published as The Dashiell Hammett Story Omnibus, Cassell (London, England), 1966.

An Unfinished Woman (memoirs; also see below), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1969, reprinted, 1999.

Pentimento: A Book of Portraits (memoirs; also see below), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1973.

Scoundrel Time (memoirs; also see below), introduction by Garry Wills, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1976, reprinted, 2000.

Three (contains An Unfinished Woman, Pentimento, Scoundrel Time, and new commentaries by author), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1979.

Maybe: A Story (memoirs), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1980.

(With Peter S. Feibleman) Eating Together: Recollections and Recipes, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1984.

PLAYS

The Children's Hour (first produced in New York, NY, 1934; also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1934, reprinted, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1988.

Days to Come (first produced in New York, NY, 1936; also see below), Knopf (New York, NY), 1936.

The Little Foxes (three-act; first produced in New York, NY, 1939; also see below), Random House (New York, NY), 1939, reprinted, Viking (New York, NY), 1986.

Watch on the Rhine (three-act; first produced on Broadway, 1941; also see below), Random House (New York, NY), 1941, with foreword by Dorothy Parker, privately printed, 1942, reprinted, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1986.

Four Plays (contains The Children's Hour, Days to Come, The Little Foxes, and Watch on the Rhine), Random House (New York, NY), 1942.

The Searching Wind (two-act; first produced in New York, NY, 1944; also see below), Viking (New York, NY), 1944.

Another Part of the Forest (three-act; first produced in New York, NY, 1946; also see below), Viking (New York, NY), 1947, reprinted, 1973.

Montserrat (two-act; adapted from Emmanuel Robles's play; first produced in New York, NY, 1949; also see below), Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1950.

The Autumn Garden (three-act; first produced in New York, NY, 1951; also see below), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1951.

The Lark (adapted from Jean Anouilh's play L'alouette; first produced on Broadway, 1955; also see below), Random House (New York, NY), 1956, acting edition, Dramatists Play Service (New York, NY), 1957.

(Author of book) Leonard Bernstein, Candide: A Comic Opera Based on Voltaire's Satire (first produced on Broadway, 1956; also see below), Random House (New York, NY), 1957.

Toys in the Attic (three-act; first produced off-Broadway, 1960; also see below), Random House (New York, NY), 1960.

Six Plays (contains Another Part of the Forest, The Autumn Garden, The Children's Hour, Days to Come, The Little Foxes, and Watch on the Rhine), Modern Library (New York, NY), 1960, with illustrations by Mark Bellerose, Franklin Library (Franklin Center, PA), 1978.

My Mother, My Father, and Me (adapted from Burt Blechman's novel How Much?; first produced on Broadway, 1963; also see below), Random House (New York, NY), 1963.

Collected Plays (contains The Children's Hour, Days to Come, The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, The Searching Wind, Another Part of the Forest, Mont-serrat, The Autumn Garden, The Lark, Candide, Toys in the Attic, and My Mother, My Father, and Me), Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1972.

Also author of unpublished and unproduced play, Dear Queen.

SCREENPLAYS

(With Mordaunt Shairp) Dark Angel, United Artists, 1935.

These Three (based on The Children's Hour), United Artists, 1936.

Dead End, United Artists, 1937.

The Little Foxes (based on her play), RKO, 1941.

The North Star, a Motion Picture about Some Russian People (released for television broadcast as Armored Attack), introduction by Louis Kronen-berger, RKO, 1943, Viking (New York, NY), 1943.

The Searching Wind, Paramount, 1946.

The Chase, Columbia, 1966.

OTHER

Pentimento: Memory as Distilled by Time (sound recording), Center for Cassette Studies, c. 1973.

Lillian Hellman: The Great Playwright Candidly Reflects on a Long Rich Life (sound recording), Center for Cassette Studies, c. 1977.

Conversations with Lillian Hellman, edited by Jackson R. Bryer, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1986.

Contributor of plays to anthologies, including Four Contemporary American Plays, Random House (New York, NY), 1961; Six Modern American Plays, Random House, 1966; and A Treasury of the Theatre: Modern Drama from Oscar Wilde to Eugene Ionesco, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1967. Contributor of sketches to "Broadway Revue," produced in New York, NY, 1968; contributor of articles to Collier's, New York Times, Travel and Leisure, and other publications.

Hellman's manuscripts are collected at the University of Texas—Austin.

ADAPTATIONS: Marc Blitzstein adapted The Little Foxes as an opera, Regina, in 1949. Another Part of the Forest was filmed by Universal in 1948; Toys in the Attic was adapted for film by United Artists, 1963. Television adaptations include Montserrat, 1971, and The Lark. A section of Hellman's memoir Pentimento was adapted for the film Julia, 1977. In 1986, William Luce wrote a one-woman play, Lillian, based on Hellman's life; the production ran briefly in New York, NY. An Unfinished Woman: A Memoir, was made into an audio book, Books on Tape, 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: She has been called one of the most influential female playwrights of the twentieth century; the voice of social consciousness in American letters; the theatre's intellectual standard-bearer—and yet Lillian Hellman always prided herself on avoiding easy labels. At the time of her death in 1984, the author/playwright could claim more long-running Broadway dramas—five—than could renowned American writers like Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, and Thornton Wilder.

Born in turn-of-the-twentieth century New Orleans to a struggling shoe merchant and his upper-middle-class wife, Hellman had the advantages of a solid education and a well-traveled childhood. By the early 1920s she had left college to work as a manuscript reader for a New York City publishing firm. For the ambitious Hell-man, the benefits of working in publishing ran beyond five o'clock. "After working hours, [the publishers'] parties gave Hellman her firsthand acquaintance with the adventurous, often reckless life of the literary world of the 1920s," said Carol MacNicholas in a Dictionary of Literary Biography essay. "The bohemian life appealed to the young woman who was just advancing into her own twenties; she enjoyed the glamour of the writer's world and nurtured the impulse to find excitement in whatever she did."

For Hellman, that impulse led her into an early marriage to press agent Arthur Kober, and career jumps into playreading and book reviewing. Following her husband to Paris, Hellman made side trips to 1929 Germany, where the embryonic Nazi movement gave the woman her first exposure to anti-Semitism, a theme that would later emerge in her plays Watch on the Rhine and The Searching Wind. By 1930 the Kobers had moved to Hollywood, where Hellman read scripts for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and met the mystery novelist/ screenwriter Dashiell Hammett.

Sensing that her marriage to Kober was failing, Hellman turned to Hammett, best known for the stylish suspense novel The Thin Man (some critics believe that Hammett based his suave detectives Nick and Nora Charles on himself and Hellman), and he became her lover and mentor. Hammett encouraged Hellman's first produced play, The Children's Hour, in 1933; her earlier play, Dear Queen, was neither published nor produced. "A play about the way scandalmongering can ruin people's lives, [The Children's Hour] focuses on two young women, Karen Wright and Martha Dobie, who have set up a private boarding school," explained MacNicholas. "Their prospects for a happy and secure future are shattered when one of their pupils, Mary Tilford, a spoiled and vicious problem child, tells her grandmother,… a pillar of local society, about an abnormal sexual relationship between Karen and Martha." The Children's Hour caused a sensation in its time, not merely for its controversial subject matter—for a movie remake in 1936, a "safe" heterosexual triangle was substituted for the play's original theme—but also for its writer's obvious talent. "So far as sheer power and originality are concerned, [Hellman's] play is not merely the best of the year but the best of many years past," wrote J.W. Krutch in a Nation review.

With that success behind her, Hellman ushered in an era, from the late 1930s through the late 1940s, of classic dramas that helped shape a golden age of American theatre. Chief among them is The Little Foxes, perhaps the playwright's best known work. An excoriating look at the rivalries and disloyalty among a turn-of-the-twentieth century Southern family, the play explores how the wealthy Hubbard clan of New Orleans schemes to keep itself rich and powerful, at the expense of both outsiders and each other. In this tale, "William Marshall, a visiting Chicago businessman, has displayed a willingness to establish a local cotton mill to be controlled by the Hubbards if they can raise enough money to buy fifty-one percent of the new company," as Mac-Nicholas explained. "An intense power struggle ensues, dividing the family into two camps: the powerful and cruel Hubbard siblings (Regina and her two brothers, Ben and Oscar), and those brought into the family by marriage (Horace, Regina's husband; Alexandra, their fair-minded daughter; and Birdie, Oscar's wife)." By the second act, added MacNicholas, every Hubbard is out for him-or herself.

The Little Foxes, both in its stage and film incarnations, was a popular and critical success. Some critics took its theme of greed as a parable for the rise of the industrial South; others saw the play as Hellman's look back at the turmoil within her own family. In 1946, seven years after The Little Foxes had premiered, Hellman produced what today is known as a "prequel": Another Part of the Forest, which takes a look at the Hubbard clan twenty years earlier than when audiences had first met them. "Twenty years does not transport them to the age of innocence; their evil natures are already well cultivated," noted Richard Moody in his book Lillian Hellman: Playwright.

The mixed reviews of Another Part of the Forest focused on critics' speculation that Hellman had packed too much melodrama into the play. Moody found that the follow-up work did "not match the earlier play in concentrated power. [Hellman] has followed too many paths. If fewer crises had been packed into the two days [in which the story takes place], if the voices had been less strident,… [then the characters] might have become more fully realized, and our hearts might have become more committed." For all its structural faults, though, Moody called Another Part of the Forest "a strong and exciting play."

In between The Little Foxes and Another Part of the Forest, Hellman premiered the political drama Watch on the Rhine. This 1941 production focused on a Washington family and the war refugees they harbor. Among the boarders are a Romanian count, his American wife, and an anti-Nazi German. Fear and prejudice follow the characters, resulting in tragedy. Except "for those who suffered through the Hitler years," remarked Moody, "the fierce impact of the play in 1941 cannot be fully sensed. If it appears melodramatic now, it appeared melodramatic then, but with a difference: the world was boiling with melodrama. Cruelty and villainy were not figments of the playwright's imagination, and it was almost impossible for a writer to tell us anything we didn't already know or to dramatize atrocities more effectively than events had already dramatized them." Hellman "knew that her fiction must do more than demonstrate the strange and awful truth that screamed from the front pages of every daily paper," he added. Rosamond Gilder, writing in Theatre Arts, called Watch on the Rhine "more faulty in structure" than The Children's Hour and The Little Foxes, and also noted that Hell-man, "whose hallmark has been an almost brutal cynicism, who has excelled in delineating mean, ruthless and predatory types," here indulges in "a tenderness, an emotionalism that borders on the sentimental."

The 1950s saw Hellman writing three play adaptations—Montserrat, The Lark, and the musical Candide—plus an original work, The Autumn Garden. It was not until 1960, however, that the playwright had her next important original drama produced. Toys in the Attic examines the psychological effects of sudden wealth on a poor family. One of Hellman's best plays, according to Moody, Toys in the Attic "achieves the magnitude and human revelation that have always been the mark of serious drama." The plot revolves around two sisters, Carrie and Anna Berniers, who have devoted their lives to their ne'er-do-well younger brother, Julian. They find that he has married a wealthy but neurotic woman, and when Julian returns home to visit, he brings his bride and virtual fistfuls of cash, which he distributes indiscriminately. "The sudden reversal of fortune is too shocking to accept, and Carrie is convinced that her brother has gone crazy," noted MacNicholas.

With Toys in the Attic, Hellman "picked up the sword of judgment many playwrights of the period [had] laid aside and [wielded] it with renewed vigor," said John Gassner in his book Dramatic Soundings: Evaluations and Retractions Culled from Thirty Years of Dramatic Criticism. Gassner also found that it is "the special merit of Lillian Hellman's work that dreadful things are done by the onstage characters out of affectionate possessiveness, rather than out of ingrained villainy. Although the author's corresponding view of life is ironic and is trenchantly expressed, there is no gloating over human misery, no horror-mongering, no traffic with sensationalism in Toys in the Attic."

Toys in the Attic was Hellman's last major play. She produced one more drama, My Mother, My Father, and Me, an adaptation of Burt Blechman's novel How Much?, but it ran only briefly in 1963. From 1969 on, Hellman became well regarded for a quartet of books recounting events in her life. From the beginning of her public life, the writer's politics had been intertwined with her career. As MacNicholas pointed out, "The origins of [Hellman's] liberalism are traced to her childhood: on the one hand, she witnessed her mother's family increase their fortunes at the expense of Negroes; on the other, she admired the dignity and tough-mindedness of her black nurse Sophronia. Dashiell Hammett, of course, was a radical who shared and influenced much of her life in the 1930s and 1940s."

In Hellman's first book of memoirs, An Unfinished Woman, she takes an unconventional approach to traditional autobiography, as Moody explained. "Only in the first third of the book does she allow chronology to govern her narrative. After that she swings freely among her remembrances of places, times, and people—all intimately observed, all colored with some special personal involvement." However unconventional the memoir is, it nonetheless won the National Book Award in Arts and Letters in 1970.

The word "pentimento" describes a phenomenon in art wherein a painting fades to the point that one can see the rough sketches and previous drafts through the surface of the finished work. The word also serves as the title of Hellman's second book of memoirs, a look at the friends and relations that fueled her adult years. This book garnered much critical notice, most notably for its sophisticated writing style. "It is now apparent that An Unfinished Woman was the beginning—a try-out, if you will, and more hesitant than arrogant—of a new career for Lillian Hellman," declared New York critic Eliot Fremont-Smith. Pentimento: A Book of Portraits "is its realization." Fremont-Smith also called the work one of "extraordinary richness and candor and self-perception, and triumph considering the courage such a book requires, a courage that lies … far deeper than one is usually inclined to accept."

Muriel Haynes, in a Ms. review, called Pentimento "a triumphant vindication of the stories the author threw away in her twenties because they were 'no good.' These complex, controlled narratives profit from the dramatist's instinct for climax and immediate, sharp characterization; but they have an emotional purity her plays have generally lacked." Less impressed was London Magazine reviewer Julian Symons, who said that the memoir "is not, as American reviewers have unwisely said, a marvel and a masterpiece and a book full of perceptions about human character. It is, rather, a collection of sketches of a fairly familiar kind, which blend real people known to history and Lillian Hellman … with people known only by their Christian names in the book, who may be real or partly fictionalized." By far the best known section of the book is "Julia," the story of Hellman's friendship during the 1930s with a rich young American woman working in the European underground against the Nazis. The story was adapted into the popular film Julia in 1977.

In the aftermath of Pentimento, as in her other books, Hellman was occasionally criticized for presenting her facts unreliably, "bending" the truth to support her views. Paul Johnson, in the Spectator, cited an article casting doubt whether "Julia" actually existed. "What [Boston University's Samuel McCracken] demonstrates, by dint of checking Thirties railway timetables, steamship passenger lists, and many other obscure sources, is that most of the facts Hellman provides about 'Julia's' movement and actions, and indeed her own, are not true." Johnson further suggested that what Hellman had been presenting all along is a left-wing apologia for World War II and the McCarthy era that followed.

Hellman, though no Stalinist, had in fact rebelled against the Cold-War communism investigations during the postwar era—in one of her most memorable lines, she informed the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) during her questioning before that group in 1952, that she had no intention of cutting her conscience to fit that year's fashion. Scoundrel Time is based on the hour Hellman sat before the HUAC, as well as "what preceded the hearings, and what its consequences were," according to Listener critic David Hunt. Bruce Cook, in a Saturday Review article, called the work "a triumph of tone. No writer I know can match the eloquence of her ah-what-the-hell as she looks back over the whole sorry spectacle and tells with restraint and precision just what she sees." Scoundrel Time, in Maureen Howard's view, "is not a confessional book. Hellman has seldom told more than her work required." "Her stories are guarded and spare by design," Howard added in the New York Times Book Review. Ms. critic Vivian Gornick shared this view, calling Scoundrel Time "a valuable piece of work. The kind of work that stands alone, untouched, in the midst of foolish criticism and foolish praise alike."

Among the Hellman memoirs, her last work, Maybe: A Story, represents the most obvious tie between fact and fiction. New Republic critic Maggie Scarf called "monumental despair" the "true subject of Maybe. For Lillian Hellman has gone swimming in the waters of time and memory and found herself adrift in a vast sea of unreliability—the shore of solid information … seems to recede each time she believes she has the true details in sight." The narrative covers the life of Sarah Cameron, a longtime acquaintance of Hellman's. Robert Towers, in a New York Times Book Review article, commented that, "absorbing as this autobiographical material is, it does not compensate, in my opinion, for the emptiness at the heart of the book. Miss Hellman fails to bring Sarah Cameron into existence as even a remotely comprehensible woman. The evidence is so scattered, so inconsistent, so blurred by time and alcohol, that we are left with a wraith too insubstantial to evoke even a sense of mystery, much less to support a valid point about the ultimate unknowability of figures in our past."

To Gornick, writing in the Village Voice, Hellman's digressions into her past seem unworthy of the author's talent. "The association between Hellman and Sarah herself has no substance whatever; it's all fragments and fancy speculations and peripheral incidents and mysterious allusions that seem only to provide the writer with an excuse to call up once again Hammett and the drinking years, the aunts in New Orleans, making movies for Sam Goldwyn. The effort to surround Sarah with metaphoric meaning is strained and painfully obvious." Walter Clemons, in Newsweek, saw the inconsistencies in Maybe in another way: "Her nonstory, for that is what her tale of Sarah turns out to be, is a tricky, nervy meditation on the fallibility of memory, the failure of attention, the casual aplomb of practiced liars, the shivery unpredictability of malice." Clemons also praised Hellman's sharp voice, given her advanced years and alcoholic history.

Maybe was Hellman's last major published work; a cookbook, cowritten with longtime friend Peter Feibleman, came out shortly after her June, 1984, death. The news of Hellman's passing brought out a string of testimonials from notable writers, including these words by Newsweek's David Ansen: "In her 60s, looking back on her life in her memoirs, Hellman found her indelible voice. The gallery of portraits in Pentimento—especially 'Julia'—are unforgettable: whether they prove to be as much fiction as fact, as some have accused, cannot diminish their power and glamour. She may have called herself 'unfinished,' but a more appropriate title would have been 'An Unmellowed Woman.'… The Hell-man anger arose from her clear-eyed view of social injustice and strong moral convictions, and she remained true to her passion throughout her rich and tumultuous life."

Decades after her death, Hellman's plays are still performed and the author herself remains a fascinating figure who continues to inspire scholarship and creativity. The 2001 musical Imaginary Friends focuses on Hellman's noted rivalry with fellow author Mary McCarthy. As noted by Hellman biographer William Wright in a New York Times article, "As a playwright, she had spent much of her life making up good stories. It was perhaps asking too much of her to abandon those skills in writing about her life and to switch abruptly to the tiresome confinements of truth…. However the falsehoods came about, they made her, for me and for others, even more interesting, if less admirable. Still, they have left a fog of mystery over her reputation that keeps us from letting her rest in peace, which of course is the last thing she would have wanted."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Adler, Jacob H., Lillian Hellman, Vaughn, 1969.

Authors in the News, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 1, 1976, Volume 2, 1976.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 2, 1974, Volume 4, 1975, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 14, 1980, Volume 18, 1981, Volume 33, 1985, Volume 44, 1987, Volume 52, 1989.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 7: Twentieth-Century American Dramatists, 1981.

Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook: 1984, Thomson Gale (Detroit, MI), 1985.

Falk, Doris V., Lillian Hellman, Ungar (New York, NY), 1978.

Gassner, John, Dramatic Soundings: Evaluations and Retractions Culled from Thirty Years of Dramatic Criticism, Crown (New York, NY), 1968.

Griffin, Alice, and Geraldine Thorsten, Understanding Lillian Hellman, University of South Carolina Press (Columbia, SC), 1998.

Lederer, Katherine, Lillian Hellman, Twayne (Boston, MA), 1979.

Mellen, Joan, Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, HarperCollins (New York, NY), 1996.

Melnick, Ralph, The Stolen Legacy of Anne Frank: Meyer Levin, Lillian Hellman, and the Staging of the Diary, Yale University Press (New Haven, CT), 1997.

Moody, Richard, Lillian Hellman: Playwright, Bobbs-Merrill (Chicago, IL), 1972.

Turk, Ruth, Lillian Hellman, Rebel Playwright, Lerner (Minneapolis, MN), 1995.

Wright, William, Lillian Hellman: The Image, the Woman, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1986.

PERIODICALS

Chicago Tribune, March 30, 1980.

Listener, November 18, 1986, David Hunt, review of Scoundrel Time.

London Magazine, August-September, 1974, Julian Symons, review of Pentimento: A Book of Portraits.

Ms., January, 1974, Muriel Haynes, review of review of Pentimento; August, 1976, Vivian Gornick, review of Scoundrel Time.

Nation, May 22, 1935, J.W. Krutch, review of The Children's Hour.

New Republic, August 2, 1980, Maggie Scarf, review of Maybe: A Story; August 13, 1984.

Newsweek, June 2, 1980, Walter Clemons, review of Maybe.

New York, September 17, 1973, Eliot Fremont-Smith, review of Pentimento.

New York Review of Books, June 10, 1976.

New York Times, November 13, 1980, August 26, 1984; November 3, 1996, William Wright, "Why Lillian Hellman Remains Fascinating," p. H9.

New York Times Book Review, September 23, 1973, April 25, 1976, Maureen Howard, review of Scoundrel Time; June 1, 1980, Robert Towers, review of Maybe.

Saturday Review, April 17, 1976, Bruce Cook, review of Scoundrel Time.

Spectator, July 14, 1984.

Theatre Arts, June, 1941, Rosamond Gilder, review of Watch on the Rhine.

Time, May 19, 1980.

Village Voice, May 19, 1980, Vivian Gornick, review of Maybe.

Washington Post, May 19, 1980.