An Unfinished Woman [antikvár]

The passionate, comic, candid memoirs of America's greatest woman of letters Lillian Heliman's plays—including The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, The Children's Hour, The Autumn Garden, Toys In the Attic—speak eloquently for themselves and for Miss Heliman's place in the world of letters. In AN UNFINISHED WOMAN, she offers a detailed, unsparing self-scrutiny and frank account of her experiences in New York, New Orleans, Hollywood, in Spain during the Civil War, in IVIoscow and Leningrad during the Second World War, and after. As this book makes clear, since childhood she has hated hypocrisy and has refused to settle for soft answers, least of all from herself. The qualities she values most are courage, loyalty and integrity, and she has found them in her closest relationships. Her extraordinary thirty-year love affair with Dashiell Hammett, her warm and completely unsentimental portrait of her close friend Dorothy Parker, a revealing chapter on two black women who profoundly influenced her life, and her involvement with the great events of her time have formed the basis of a book that calls upon ali Miss Heliman's formidable powers of intellect, imagination and style. This is the book that received the National Book Award In March 1970 as the best book of the year in the category of Arts and Letters. AN UNFINISHED WOMAN by Lillian Hellman a memoir I WAS bom in New Orleans to Julia Newhouse from Demopolis, Alabama, who had fallen in love and stayed in love with Max Hellman, whose parents had come to New Orleans in the German 1845-1848 immigration to give birth to him and bis two sisters. My mother's family, long before I was bom, had moved from Demopolis to Cincinnati and then to New Orleans, both desirable cities, I guess, for three marriageable girls. But I first remember them in a large New York apartment: my two young and very pretty aunts; their taciturn, tight-faced brother; and the silent, powerful, severe woman, Sophie Newhouse, who was their mother, my grandmother. Her children, her servants, aU of her relatives except for her brother Jake were frightened of her, and so was I. Even as a small child I disliked myself for the fear and showed off against it. The Newhouse apartment held the upper-middle-class trappings, in touch of things and in spirit of people, that 1