[1] As a playwright, Hellman had many successes on Broadway, including The Children's Hour, The Little Foxes and its sequel Another Part of the Forest, Watch on the Rhine, The Autumn Garden, and Toys in the Attic.

She felt an initial attraction to a Nazi student group that advocated "a kind of socialism" until their questioning about her Jewish ties made their antisemitism clear, and she returned immediately to the United States.

[9] Although she found the job rather dull, it created many opportunities for her to meet a greater range of creative people while she became involved in more political and artistic scenes during that time.

[18] On May 1, 1935, Hellman joined the League of American Writers (1935–1943), whose members included Dashiell Hammett, Alexander Trachtenberg of International Publishers, Frank Folsom, Louis Untermeyer, I.F.

[24] In March 1937, Hellman joined a group of 88 U.S. public figures in signing "An Open Letter to American Liberals" that protested an effort headed by John Dewey to examine Leon Trotsky's defense against his 1936 condemnation by the Soviet Union.

[26] In October 1937, Hellman spent a few weeks in Spain to lend her support, as other writers had, to the International Brigades of non-Spaniards who had joined the anti-Franco side in the Spanish Civil War.

Bankhead told reporters, "I've adopted Spanish Loyalist orphans and sent money to China, causes for which both Mr. Shumlin and Miss Hellman were strenuous proponents ... why should [they] suddenly become so insular?

[32]On January 9, 1940, viewing the spread of fascism in Europe and fearing similar political developments in the United States, she said at a luncheon of the American Booksellers Association:[33] I am a writer and I am also a Jew.

I also want to be able to go on saying that I am a Jew without being afraid of being called names or end in a prison camp or be forbidden to walk the street at night.Her play Watch on the Rhine opened on Broadway on April 1, 1941, and ran for 378 performances.

She wrote the play in 1940, when its call for a united international alliance against Hitler directly contradicted the Communist position at the time, following the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of August 1939.

[42] She objected to the film's production numbers that, she said, turned a village festival into "an extended opera bouffe peopled by musical comedy characters", but still told The New York Times that it was "a valuable and true picture which tells a good deal of the truth about fascism".

[43] British historian Robert Conquest wrote that it was "a travesty greater than could have been shown on Soviet screens to audiences used to lies, but experienced in collective-farm conditions.

[45] Her third World War II project, it tells the story of an ambassador whose indecisive relations with his wife and mistress mirror the vacillation and appeasement of his professional life.

[50] In August 1944, she received a passport, indicative of government approval, for travel to Russia on a goodwill mission as a guest of VOKS, the Soviet agency that handled cultural exchanges.

[55] In November 1947, the leaders of the motion picture industry decided to deny employment to anyone who refused to answer questions posed by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

In 1952, Hellman was called to testify before House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had heard testimony that she had attended Communist Party meetings in 1937.

He warned that the committee and the public would expect her to take a strong anti-communist stand to atone for her political past, but she refused to apologize or denounce the party.

Faced with Hellman's position, Rauh devised a strategy that produced favorable press coverage and allowed her to avoid the stigma of being labeled a "Fifth Amendment Communist".

When asked about attending a specific meeting at the home of Hollywood screenwriter Martin Berkeley,[65] she refused to respond, claiming her rights under the Fifth Amendment and she referred the committee to her letter by way of explanation.

I was raised in an old-fashioned American tradition and there were certain homely things that were taught to me: to try to tell the truth, not to bear false witness, not to harm my neighbour, to be loyal to my country, and so on.

In April 1952, the department stated its one formal charge against him: "that during the period 1945 to date, you have maintained an association with one, Lillian Hellman, reliably reported to be a member of the Communist Party," based on testimony from unidentified informants.

[72] Hellman made an English-language adaption of Jean Anouilh's play L'Alouette, based on the trial of Joan of Arc, called The Lark.

[79] A second film version of The Children's Hour, less successful both with critics and at the box office, appeared in 1961 under that title, but Hellman played no role in the screenplay, having withdrawn from the project following Hammett's death in 1961.

[80] In the 1961 version of The Children's Hour, however, despite the continued existence of the Motion Picture Production Code, the lead characters (played by Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine) were explicitly accused of lesbianism.

Although Hellman received sole credit for the screenplay, she worked from an earlier treatment, and producer Sam Spiegel made additional changes and altered the sequence of scenes.

[87][88] Hellman wrote a reminiscence of gulag-survivor Lev Kopelev, husband of her translator in Russia during 1944, to serve as the introduction to his anti-Stalinist memoirs, To Be Preserved Forever, which appeared in 1976.

[95] In the early 1970s, Hellman taught writing for short periods at the University of California, Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Hunter College in New York City.

Her archive includes an extensive collection of manuscript drafts, contracts, correspondence, scrapbooks, speeches, teaching notes, awards, legal documents, appointment books, and honorary degrees.

[124] Hellman's feud with Mary McCarthy formed the basis for Nora Ephron's 2002 play Imaginary Friends, with music by Marvin Hamlisch and lyrics by Craig Carnelia.

Chuck Palahniuk's novel Tell-All (2010) was described by Janet Maslin in The New York Times as "a looney pipe dream that savages Lillian Hellman".