plays, and engaged in world-class brawls with producer Sam Goldwyn. She tried her hand at other genres, too, collaborating (if Hellman the dictator could ever be said to have collaborated) with her friends Leonard Bernstein and Richard Wilbur on a musical production of Candide.

Though adept at self-promotion, she took writing very seriously, as both a teacher and a reader. Chekhov, she wrote in the introduction to a 1955 collection of his letters, was "a man of deep social ideals and an uncommon sense of social responsibility"—her highest praise—as well as a "workman" playwright for whom "the smallest stage movement has an end in view and is not being used to trick or deceive or pull fashionable wool over our eyes."

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