Subseries B., Other Works, has been arranged into the following categories: Cookbook, Film, Interviews, Memoirs, Short Works, and Speeches. Prominent are the drafts of Hellman's four volumes of memoirs published between 1969 and 1980, along with the afterwords she wrote for Three, the 1979 one-volume publication of the texts of Pentimento, Scoundrel Time, and An Unfinished Woman. The drafts of the mysterious Maybe include large-type pages made necessary by Hellman's deteriorating vision.
Lillian Hellman's work on the films The Chase and The North Star is represented by drafts found in the subseries, along with some other film work not based on her own dramas. Unrealized film projects present here include a 1952 script of Nancy Mitford's The Blessing and an outline of Christina Stead's The Little Hotel (1976).
Drafts and notes for articles and other short pieces, together with interviews, speeches, teaching files, and her editorial work on The Selected Letters of Anton Chekhov complete the subseries.
The Dashiell Hammett files contain letters from Hammett to Hellman written between 1931 and 1950. Accompanying these is correspondence between Lillian Hellman and Diane Johnson, Steven Marcus, Stephen Talbot, and Jon Tuska, all of whom, as Hammett biographers, faced greater or lesser difficulties placed in their paths by Hellman.
At Dorothy Parker's death in 1973 Lillian Hellman became her friend's literary executor. While few letters between them are found here, there is substantial correspondence dealing both with publication of Parker's work and with attempts of various writers to produce biographies of Mrs. Parker. Hellman's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to prevent publication of John Keats's You Might as Well Live is detailed in her letters to Keats and to his publisher, Viking Press.
An extensive correspondence between Hellman, her father Max, and her aunts during the period of Max Hellman's hospitalization in the late 1940s survives in the papers and gives a view of Hellman family dynamics.
Perhaps the most significant group of letters from the pre-World War Two period to remain in the Hellman papers is one relating to the Spanish Civil War documentary film The Spanish Earth. A number of letters from Herman Shumlin and Archibald MacLeish relating to the production of that film, along with later correspondence from director Joris Ivens and the film's distributors are present.
The extensive index of correspondents found at the end of this finding aid identifies and locates these and numerous other personal and corporate correspondents in the papers. The large collection of fan mail in the series is selectively indexed.
Hellman notebooks found in the series are in the main notes for or of foreign travel between 1944 and 1980, containing notations ranging from mundane to do lists to sharp observations of people and places. The notebooks kept in Russia and Yugoslavia the 1940s and in Washington and the Near East in 1963 and '64 record thoughts and scenes which found their way into some of Hellman's periodical articles.
Dashiell Hammett, both as a writer and as a political figure, is well-represented in the clippings and scrapbooks of this series. Two scrapbooks are devoted to coverage of his writing career between 1929 and 1950, and several folders of post-1950 clippings are concerned with his political and creative life.
The materials assembled by federal government agencies concerning Lillian Hellman include, in folder 119.3, copies of letters the originals of which exist in Miss Hellman's correspondence files. Examples are letters written to her in the late 1960s by Elena Golisheva and Grigori Kozintsev.
| Lillian Hellman Papers Finding Aid | |||||
| Title Page | Biographical Sketch |
Scope and Contents |
Series Descriptions |
Folder List | Index of Correspondents |
Reference queries to: reference@hrc.utexas.edu
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