Pentimento: A Book Of Portraits
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: minor nick/tear on the front of the dj; internally sound.
From one of the twentieth century's most formidable literary voices comes Pentimento: A Book of Portraits, a stunning memoir-in-vignettes that resurrects the vivid ghosts of a life extraordinarily lived. Lillian Hellman — celebrated playwright, political firebrand, and unflinching witness to her times — presents a series of intimate portraits of the people who shaped her: a bold and reckless cousin, a lifelong friend named Julia whose anti-fascist courage echoes through history, and a cast of characters as compelling and contradictory as Hellman herself. Named after the painterly phenomenon in which older images bleed through a canvas as its surface ages, the book argues that memory is never fixed — it is layered, revised, and haunted by what lies beneath. Hellman's prose is razor-sharp yet deeply lyrical, blending the authority of a dramatist's eye with the vulnerability of genuine self-examination. Pentimento stands as a landmark of American autobiographical writing, inviting readers to question not only the reliability of memory but the very nature of truth in storytelling. It is a work that rewards close reading, leaving one to wonder: how much of any portrait — of others, or of ourselves — is invention, and how much is revelation?
Author: Lillian Hellman
Format: Hardback
Published: 1974, Macmillan
Genre: Biography
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Good
Markings: Previous owner
Condition remarks: minor nick/tear on the front of the dj; internally sound.
From one of the twentieth century's most formidable literary voices comes Pentimento: A Book of Portraits, a stunning memoir-in-vignettes that resurrects the vivid ghosts of a life extraordinarily lived. Lillian Hellman — celebrated playwright, political firebrand, and unflinching witness to her times — presents a series of intimate portraits of the people who shaped her: a bold and reckless cousin, a lifelong friend named Julia whose anti-fascist courage echoes through history, and a cast of characters as compelling and contradictory as Hellman herself. Named after the painterly phenomenon in which older images bleed through a canvas as its surface ages, the book argues that memory is never fixed — it is layered, revised, and haunted by what lies beneath. Hellman's prose is razor-sharp yet deeply lyrical, blending the authority of a dramatist's eye with the vulnerability of genuine self-examination. Pentimento stands as a landmark of American autobiographical writing, inviting readers to question not only the reliability of memory but the very nature of truth in storytelling. It is a work that rewards close reading, leaving one to wonder: how much of any portrait — of others, or of ourselves — is invention, and how much is revelation?