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.
- ISBN10 0300191960
- ISBN13 9780300191967
- Publish Date 29 March 2013 (first published 28 June 2011)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Yale University Press
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Pages 376
- Language English
- URL http://wiley.com/remtitle.cgi?isbn=9780300191967