Lily: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman
by: Peter Feibleman

NY, William Morrow, 1988, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, price-clipped dust jacket. 364 pages, b&w photos. Novelist Peter Feibleman first met world-famous playwright Lillian Hellman when he was ten and she was thirty-five-years old, and out of that first encounter there grew romantic friendship that was to blossom into a love affair--one that ended only with her death. Drawing on many of her letters, private journals, and conversations recorded by them both specifically for this memoir, and on her later published and unpublished works, as well as on his own diaries, Feibleman brings to life one of the most glittering, fascinating, and complex women of our time. LILLY is replete with anecdotes about Miss Hellman's celebrated friends, including Dashiell Hammett, with whom she shared her life for many years; Dorothy Parker; Elizabeth Taylor, who made a triumphant stage appearance in 'The Little Foxes'; Mike Nichols; Elaine May; Leonard Bernstein; and her Martha's Vineyard neighbors--Jules Feiffer, Barbara and John Hersey, Ann and Art Buchwald, Rose and William Styron, and many, many others. Her animosities are depicted as well, including her lengthy and virulent feud with Mary McCarthy. What emerges is an intensely personal portrait, unique and fully realized, of an immensely talented writer, her ways of loving, and her world.