Hellman and Hammett: The Legendary Passion of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett

Joan Mellen

In the first dual biography of Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett, Joan Mellen sheds new light on two of the twentieth century's most intriguing characters. The first biographer to draw from the Hellman-Hammett archives at the University of Texas, and with unprecedented access to their circle of friends, Mellen taps mines of fresh material to produce a groundbreaking look at these extraordinary American nonconformists, separately and together. Cutting against the social and political grain of their day, Hellman and Hammett as proud American radicals were persecuted during McCarthyism. They also turned out some of the most compelling prose of our country: Hammett's classic Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, and The Thin Man, and Hellman's plays The Little Foxes, Watch on the Rhine, and her memoirs An Unfinished Woman and Pentimento. Meanwhile, Lillian Hellman and Dashiell Hammett defied every accepted formula of how a man and woman should love each other: intimate as a couple, they lived together infrequently, drank to excess, participated in orgies, and engaged in flagrant infidelities. For the first time, members of Hellman and Hammett's circle, including Peter Feibleman, Norman Mailer, and Rose Styron, have agreed to speak openly about this enigmatic relationship which defined an era.