Lillian Hellman left the theater a couple of decades before she left this world. In her remaining years, she published memoirs depicting herself as a conscience-driven adversary of misogynists, Nazis, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. When public intellectuals such as Mary McCarthy, Norman Podhoretz, and Diana Trilling took issue with what she wrote, Hellman let rip with insults and invective. By the time she died in 1984, Hellman’s name was associated more with public feuds than with the literate Broadway plays that had made her famous.