A Difficult Woman: The Challenging Life and Times of Lillian Hellman
*Starred Review* Hellman was one of the most successful American female playwrights, and her own life was exceptionally dramatic. She is remembered as a caustic woman, a tough broad who made excuses for Stalin’s brutality and made her own personal mythology. Renowned historian Kessler-Harris takes a penetrating look at the life and subsequent images of Hellman, a woman who defied the conventions of her time and has come to defy easy judgment. Despite her efforts to illuminate moral issues in her plays Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic, Hellman was accused of being overemotional. Politically, she angered anticommunists and communists alike during the Red Scare, and she pushed boundaries for women but eschewed the label of feminist. Married and divorced, she maintained a lifelong relationship with her ex-husband and his wife, along with a turbulent long-term romance with writer Dashiell Hammett and liaisons with a string of other men. Well into old age, she maintained a sexual vibrancy that belied her lack of conventional beauty. Kessler-Harris portrays a complex woman, full of contradictions and insecurities, volatile, generous, nurturing, sharp tongued, and quick witted. Though much has been written about Hellman, readers will enjoy this reexamination of what Kessler-Harris calls a “juicy character” in the rarefied New York literary set, one who led a life filled with sex, scandals, art, and ideas.       HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: This biography of one of the most controversial women of the twentieth century, written by an award-winning, renowned historian, is sure to receive plenty of critical attention. --Vanessa Bush