Books like Pentimento - A Book Of Portraits by Lillian Hellman

A brave, self-exploring memoir of an autistic woman's journey towards understanding and embracing her unique condition.

Joan Mellen’s dual biography explores the intertwined lives of playwright Lillian Hellman and novelist Dashiell Hammett, drawing on new archives and firsthand accounts.

The Mitford sisters and their tumultuous lives between the wars.

A revelatory and provocative biography of one of the most controversial women of the twentieth century, by one of America's most renowned historians. Lillian Hellman was a giant of twentieth-century letters and a groundbreaking figure as one of the most successful female playwrights on Broadway. Yet the author of The Little Foxes and Toys in the Attic is today remembered more as a toxic, bitter survivor and literary fabulist, the woman of whom Mary McCarthy said, "Every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the.'" In A Difficult Woman, renowned historian Alice Kessler-Harris undertakes a feat few would dare to attempt: a reclamation of a combative, controversial woman who straddled so many political and cultural fault lines of her time. Kessler-Harris renders Hellman's feisty wit and personality in all of its contradictions: as a non-Jewish Jew, a displaced Southerner, a passionate political voice without a party, an artist immersed in commerce, a sexually free woman who scorned much of the women's movement, a loyal friend whose trust was often betrayed, and a writer of memoirs who repeatedly questioned the possibility of achieving truth and doubted her memory. Hellman was a writer whose plays spoke the language of morality yet whose achievements foundered on accusations of mendacity. Above all else, she was a woman who made her way in a man's world. Kessler-Harris has crafted a nuanced life of Hellman, empathetic yet unsparing, that situates her in the varied contexts in which she moved, from New Orleans to Broadway to the hearing room of HUAC. A Difficut Woman is a major work of literary and intellectual history. - Publisher.

Edith Head: Hollywood's Most Important Costume Designer

An intimate memoir of Bella Cohen Spewack’s early years on New York’s Lower East Side, traced from her 1902 arrival to her journalistic work in Berlin and the beginnings of a celebrated playwriting partnership.