Just words [electronic resource] : Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the failure of public conversation in America / Alan Ackerman.

9780300171808 (electronic book)
9780300167122

New Haven, Conn. : Yale University Press, c2011.

English

1 online resource (xi, 361 p.) : ill.

KF228.H45 A25 2011eb

346.73/034

In an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in 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.

Includes bibliographical references (p. 305-341) and index.

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