Just Words : Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America
, by Alan AckermanNote: Supplemental materials are not guaranteed with Rental or Used book purchases.
- ISBN: 9780300167122 | 0300167121
- Cover: Trade Book
- Copyright: 6/28/2011
In an appearance onThe Dick Cavett Showin 1980, the critic Mary McCarthy glibly remarked that every word author Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, "including 'and' and 'the.'" Hellman immediately filed a libel suit, charging that McCarthy's comment was not a legitimate conversation on public issues but an attack on her reputation. This intriguing book offers a many-faceted examination of Hellman's infamous suit and explores what it tells us about tensions between privacy and self-expression, freedom and restraint in public language, and what can and cannot be said in public in America.