Lillian Hellman
Lillian Florence "Lilly" Hellman (June 20, 1905 – June 30, 1984) was an American dramatist and screenwriter known for her left-wing sympathies and political activism. She famously was blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) at the height of the anti-communist campaigns of 1947–52. Although she continued to work on Broadway in the 1950s, her blacklisting by the American film industry caused a precipitous decline in her income. Hellman was praised for sacrificing her career by refusing to answer questions by HUAC; but her denial that she had ever belonged to the Communist Party was easily disproved, and her veracity was doubted by many, including war correspondent Martha Gellhorn and literary critic Mary McCarthy. Hellman was romantically involved with fellow writer and political activist Dashiell Hammett, who also was blacklisted, for thirty years until his death in 1961. The couple never married as Hammett already had a wife. She adapted her semi-autobiographical play The Little Foxes into a screenplay which received an Academy Award nomination in 1942. Hellman's reputation went into sharp decline after her veracity was attacked by Mary McCarthy during a 1980 appearance on The Dick Cavett Show. Hellman sued McCarthy for libel, and it eventually came out that not only were Hellman's popular memoirs such as Pentimento rife with errors, but that the "Julia" section of Pentimento that was the basis for the Oscar-winning 1977 movie of the same name likely was a fabrication based on the life of Muriel Gardiner. Martha Gellhorn joined McCarthy in the attack on Hellman's veracity, showing that Hellman's remembrances of Gellhorn's ex-husband Ernest Hemingway and the Spanish Civil War were wrong. Tagged with the onus of being an unrepentant Stalinist by the staunchly anti-Stalinist McCarthy and others, Hellman remains a divisive figure of American letters.