Lillian Hellman was one of the most influential and successful playwrights of her time.
             Throughout her professional life she has expanded her writing into different genres, as
             well as being a playwright she was a screenwriter during a popular time in Hollywood and
             later in her life she wrote many popular memoirs reviewing her life. Hellman was
             gripped with many obstacles in her career and personal life, including a torrid love affair
             with writer Dashiell Hammett, having to testify in front of the house on un-American
             activities and being a female in a male dominated profession.
             Julia Newhouse and Max Bernard Hellman had only one child, Lillian Florence
             Hellman, born June 20th 1905 in New Orleans. Growing up she would spend her time
             between New York where her parents lived in New Orleans. Lillian stayed with her two
             aunts in a bed and breakfast they owned in the French Quarter. As a child Lillian would
             romp through the dangerous city of new Orleans by herself proving she was very
             independent at an early age. Six months out of the year she would attend school in New
             Orleans, the rest was spent in New York where she also attended school. She decided to
             go to college in the east, attending both New York University and Columbia University.
             In 1925 Lillian Hellman left college and read scripts for a living. On December
             31st she married her husband Arthur Kober, who also became a successful playwright.
             Through these years Hellman traveled to Paris and Germany. Kober and Hellman moved
             to Hollywood in 1930, where Kober worked as a screenwriter and Lillian Hellman read
             manuscripts for MGM. In Hollywood she met Dashiell Hammett. Shortly after she moved
             to New York and lived with Hammett, she divorced Arthur Kober.
             In New York Hammet wrote The Thin Man modeling his character Nora Charles
             after Lillian. After little luck in New York Hellman moved back to California as a
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