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Scoundrel Time | 
 enlarge | Author: Lillian Hellman
Creator: Garry Wills
Publisher: Back Bay Books
Category: Book
List Price: $19.99
Buy Used: $1.87
You Save: $18.12 (91%)
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Avg. Customer Rating:  7 reviews
Sales Rank: 247498
Media: Paperback
Edition: 1st Back Bay Paperback Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 176
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.5
Dimensions (in): 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.6
ISBN: 0316352942
Dewey Decimal Number: 812.52
EAN: 9780316352949
ASIN: 0316352942
Publication Date: July 1, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Hardcovered edition...pages are all mint and clean condition...dustjacket has very slight wear...binding is excellent...fast shipping same or next business day!!!
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Product Description
In 1952, Hellman joined the ranks of intellectuals and artists called before Congress to testify about political subversion. Terrified yet defiant, Hellman refused to incriminate herself or others, and managed to avoid trial. Nonetheless the experience brought devastating controversy and loss. First published in 1972, her retelling of the time features a remarkable cast of characters, including her lover, novelist Dashiell Hammett, a slew of famous friends and colleagues, and a pack of "scoundrels" -- ruthless, ambitious politicians and the people who complied with their demands.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 Commendable service! October 28, 2008
I was very pleased with the service I received in the shipping of Scoundrel Time from this vendor.
"I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions." February 27, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Lillian Hellman (1905-1984) originally came to public attention as the author of THE CHILDREN'S HOUR and would go on to create a number of other landmark plays for the stage, including WATCH ON THE RHINE, THE LITTLE FOXES, and TOYS IN THE ATTIC. She is easily among the great American dramatists of the 20th Century--but even so she is perhaps more famous for the events of 1952, the year in which she faced the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee at the height of its dark powers... and the committee blinked.
In 1969 Hellman published the autobiography AN UNFINISHED WOMAN; in 1973 she continued writing of her life with PENTIMENTO; and in 1976 she wrote an account of her encounter with HUAC in SCOUNDREL TIME. All three books were controversial, and writer Mary McCarthy famously stated "Everything she writes is a lie--and that includes 'and' and 'the!'" It was true that Hellman shaded the truth more than just a little, especially where her own support for Soviet Russia was concerned; it was true that she also had a distinct tendency to ignore her own failings and excesses even as she zeroed in mercilessly on those of others. All the same, no one can deny a singular fact: unlike a long line of others, she neither crawled nor self-destructed before HUAC. In the process she became among the first to show up the committee for the lawless, headline-hungry entity it had become.
As more than one biographer has noted, Hellman actually behaved with the courage and dignity we hope we would possess if confronted with a similar situation. It cost her a great deal: blacklisted and unable to work, Hellman would spend more than a decade counting pennies and struggling to rebuild her life and career. SCOUNDREL TIME, which presents Hellman's confrontation with HUAC from her own clearly biased view, is a fascinating portrait of both the "red scare" and the various figures who swirled through it--from then-congressman Richard Nixon to director Elia Kazan to writer Clifford Odets--and of how she herself saw her own place in a moment that would come to define mid-20th Century America. Flawed? Shaded? Yes, indeed. But nonetheless involving and revealing for that. Recommended.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
 WHO is the scoundrel here? May 28, 2006
1 out of 8 found this review helpful
Intellectual children, still fresh from their nurseries,
sip this revolting woman's non-stop deceit. Her utter
silence about her lover Otto Katz's torture and execution back
in communist Czechoslovakia, and her totally bogus JULIA say
it all. When she was not suing someone, she was confabulating
her own autobiography along the way. Funny, her career begins
as Hammett's fades. A HUAC plot, no doubt.
'Truth makes you a traitor... in a time of scoundrels' September 12, 2005
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
`Scoundrel Time' is a harrowing, highly personal account of the events surrounding Lillian Hellman's appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee, HUAC, in 1952. It was, to put it mildly, a tricky situation. Although Hellman did not `cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions,' the damage to her life and career were extensive. Even though she was not a friendly witness the Committee didn't cite her for contempt. That did nothing to save her from being blacklisted, however. Beyond a revealing look at a life disrupted by a government that felt, as Garry Wills puts it in his extended introduction, `Hollywood must be censored politically if nation was to be protected ideologically,' Hellman details the post-hearing shake-out. Without a chance to work at home, and with work abroad hindered by an ever-suspicious government, Hellman would eventually lose her home, a number of fair-weather friends, while we all lost a decade's worth of plays and screenplays.
It's helpful to read Wills' introduction prior to Hellman's book. Wills writes that Hellman's scheduled appearance before the Committee `was especially dangerous because Miss Hellman was as little qualified to understand the Committee as it was to grasp her code of honor.' Wills supplies the context while Hellman concentrates on the emotions of someone undergoing a witch hunters' scrutiny. Wills rightly discerns an inability on Hellman's part to understand that Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy, and others of their ilk were sincere Cold Warriors. All things considered Hellman displays a rather surprising dearth of rancor towards her persecutors, but she doesn't hide the fact that she considers them unscrupulous opportunists.
`Scoundrel Time' was published in 1976, shortly after the resignation of one of Hellman's persecutors, Richard Nixon. To paraphrase Jimmy Breslin, the good guys finally won and it must have given an odd sense of satisfaction to those who lives were disrupted by his rise to power. Hellman is a flawed and vulnerable character in this memoir, and all the more human for it.
 a very personal view of a difficult time June 23, 2004
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Lillian Hellman was a decent person who was caught in a terrible cross wind and ruined. From a charmed life as a screenwriter, she fell to the bottom more quickly than she could have imagined possible. I found this to be the least successful of her series of memoires, in which she re-made herself and re-entered the spotlight as a good if not truly distingusihed writer. However, the topic is more focused than the other volumes, in particular focusing on the travials of her friend, Dashell Hammett. This is very moving. In fact, I found the best part of the book was the introduction by Garry WIlls, who is a truly first-rate political writer. His depiction of the time, made more vivid by his self-identification as a conservation, is chilling and comic at the same time - he recalls how Ayn RAND said that any film with Russians even smiling was propaganda and hence punishable by law!Recommended, but there are better and far more comprehensive histories of the period.
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