Ackerman Alan Ackerman 
Just Words [EPUB ebook] 
Lillian Hellman, Mary McCarthy, and the Failure of Public Conversation in America

In an appearance on The Dick Cavett Show in 1980, the critic Mary Mc Carthy glibly remarked that every word author Lillian Hellman wrote was a lie, "including ‘and’ and ‘the.’" Hellman immediately filed a libel suit, charging that Mc Carthy’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.