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1. What is Harper Lee also known as?
a)Lee, Nelle Harper b) Darnell, Monetta Eloyse
c) Treisman, David d) Quinn, Brayden Tyler
2. Where was Harper Lee born?
a) Oklahoma City, Oklahoma b)Monroeville, Alabama
c) New Albany, Mississippi d)San Francisco, California
3. What did Harper Lee do for a living?
a)Novelist b)Musician, Composer, Entertainer
c) priest, professor, literary critic d) Professional rugby player
Lillian Hellman
(1905 - 1984)
Lillian Hellman is a well-known American playwright. She was born in New Orleans in a family of a businessman. In her school years she read much and had a short career as an actress. Then she continued her education at New York University. After finishing the university course, she attended classes at Columbia University in the Russian and English novel. She liked Dostoevsky and wanted to write a book on literature.
L. Hellman tried to write short stories, reviewed books and sometimes got some jobs from publishers. In the spring of 1929 she earned enough money to go to Europe. She travelled in Germany and came to understand what fascism was.
The following year Hellman moved to Hollywood, where she found a job as a play reader for a film company. At eight-thirty every morning she joined her fellow readers. At that time she met Hammett, a well-known journalist and writer of detective novels? Who became her friend and teacher in writing.
He criticized her stories and taught her how to work. “A writer must learn to write by practicing,” he always told her. “Read, think and study, and then write.”
Two of Hellman’s stories were published in 1933 in the literary newspaper edited by a number of well-known American writers, Th. Dreiser and others. Her first play “The children’s Hour” was staged on Broadway in 1934 and was a success. The play shows moral corruption of children in capitalist society. Next year the writer was invited to Hollywood as a scriptwriter to make a film of “The Children’s Hour”.
The next play “Days to Come” was about strikers and strike – breakers at a factory. The writer didn’t know the class struggle well enough to show it on the stage.
In 1936 Lillian Hellman was invited to go to Spain with a group of producers who wanted to make a documentary film. At that time a revolution took place in Spain and the Spanish people were defending it and trying to stop fascism. On the way to Spain they stopped in Paris and L. Hellman was introduced to Ernest Hemingway. Some time before she was invited to a Moscow theatre festival and she now decided to visit the USSR. After a short visit to Moscow she joined her group in Spain and stayed there for a month. The documentary film “The Spanish Earth” was released in 1937 and was successful. Hemingway helped to make it and gave the producers some of the shots of fighting near Madrid.
When L. Hellman returned home, she began to write a new play. In 1939 the play “The Little Foxes” was performed and was a great success with the public and also with the critics. It showed how a bourgeois family was corrupted by greed for money. The members of the family try to get money by means of theft and even murder.
In 1941 L. Hellman wrote the anti-fascist play “Watch on the Rhine”. The same year L. Hellman visited the USSR again. She was a member of cinema-workers’ group which came to the USSR to shoot a film “The Northern Star” about the struggle of the Soviet people against German fascists.
She was present at the rehearsal of the plays “The Little Foxes” and “The Searching Wind” in Moscow theatres and stayed at the Leningrad front for two weeks.
In 1966 L. Hellman visited the USSR once more and attended the Fourth National Congress of the Union of Writers. At present Lillian Hellman is a professor of literature at Yale University.
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