Lillian Hellman was born as the only child of Julia Newhouse and
Max Hellman on June 20th 1905 on Prytania Street in New Orleans. Her
mother’s family was rich, upper-middle-class. Her father ran a shoe
store but went bankruptcy in 1911, then became a traveling salesman.
Lillian lived in New York with her mother's relatives and lived in New
Orleans with her father’s sisters every six months.
She described her experiences in “An Unfinished Woman”(1969).
"I was thus moved from school in New York to school in New Orleans without care for the season or the quality of the school. This constant need for adjustment in two very different worlds made formal education into a kind of frantic tennis game, sometimes played with children whose strokes had force and brilliance, sometimes with those who could played with those who could barely hold the racket. Possibly it is the reason I never did well in school or in college, and why I wanted to be left alone to read by myself. I had found, very early, that any other test found me bounding with ease and grace over one fence to fall on my face as I ran towards the next."
She continued this "frantic tennis game" life from the age of six until she attends college.
Her experiences, treated as the poor granddaughter in New York,
made her into an angry child and caused her mixture of respect and
hatred for money and people who have it. Her avaricious relatives later
appeared in "The Little Foxes"(1939), a chilling story of the financial and psychological conflicts within a wealthy Southern family.
Peter Feibleman wrote about her mother's family oriented influence on her in “LILLY: Reminiscences of Lillian Hellman”:
“It was because of her mother’s family that she was attracted to the rich and hated them all her life. She never came to terms with growing up, and the outraged heart of childhood lasted through old age.”
In the early 1920s, she studied at New York University and Columbia
University. Then she immediately got a job as a manuscript reader with
Horace Liveright, a publisher in New York. She left the Liveright to
marry Arthur Kober in 1925, who was a theatre press agent. In the first
few years of marriage, she traveled to Paris and wandered around Europe.
Then Kober was offered a job as a scenario writer for Paramount
Pictures, and prepared for her job of reading manuscripts & writing
reports at MGM.
About her life with Kober, she described in “An Unfinished Woman” (1969) as follows:
Though she felt the work dull, it provided her the opportunity to meet a wider range of creative people.“I did not yet know about “inhuman cities” or roads built with no relief for the eye, or the effects of a hated house upon the spirit. I didn’t even understand about my marriage, or my life, and had no knowledge of the new twists I was braiding into the kinks I was already bound round with.”
“I was rash, overdaring, certain only that any adventure was worth having, and increasingly muddled by the Puritan conscience that made me pay for the adventures. I needed a teacher, a cool teacher, who would not be impressed or disturbed by a strange and difficult girl. I was to meet him, but not for another four or five years.”It was in Hollywood that she had a fateful encounter with the hard-boiled ex-detective novelist Dashiell Hammett, beginning a close friendship with "a cool teacher" which lasted for thirty years.