Pentimento: A Book of Portraits

Pentimento: A Book of Portraits
Cover for a 1974 Canadian printing
AuthorLillian Hellman
PublisherLittle, Brown and Company[1]

Pentimento: A Book of Portraits is a 1973 book by American writer Lillian Hellman.[2] It takes the form of an autobiographical work, focusing on "portraits" of various people that had effects on the author throughout her life.[1]

The book was subject to controversy over the authenticity of a section about an anti-Nazi Resistance member called "Julia", which was later made into Fred Zinneman's film Julia. A psychiatrist named Muriel Gardiner later suggested that her life story was fictionalized as Julia. Gardiner was a wealthy American who went to medical school in the First Austrian Republic following World War I and became involved in the illegal and underground Social Democratic Party of Austria under the rule of Engelbert Dollfuss and the later Austrian Resistance to Nazism there before her return to the US in 1939.[3]

  1. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Hirtl1973 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ "Services planned for Hellman". news.google.com.au. The Milwaukee Sentinel. 2 July 1984. Retrieved 13 May 2010.[dead link]
  3. ^ Cengel, Katya (March 2023). "The American Heiress Who Risked Everything to Resist the Nazis". Smithsonian Magazine. Smithsonian Institution. Retrieved 15 February 2023.