Lillian Hellman's searing drama exposes the ruthless Hubbard family of the post-Civil War South, whose matriarch-in-waiting, Regina Giddens, schemes alongside her grasping brothers Ben and Oscar to secure a lucrative cotton-mill deal that will finally bring the family the wealth and power they crave. Regina's ailing husband Horace holds the capital the family desperately needs to close the deal, and when he refuses to hand it over on principle, Regina's brothers steal the funds behind his back, setting off a spiral of blackmail, betrayal, and cold calculation among siblings who trust one another not at all. In the play's most chilling turn, Regina withholds her husband's heart medication during a fatal attack, watching him die rather than lift a hand to save him, a moment of icy self-interest that has become one of American drama's most unforgettable images of ambition unchecked by conscience. Around this central struggle, Hellman also traces the moral cost paid by the family's younger generation, particularly Regina's daughter Alexandra, who begins to see clearly the corruption underlying her family's genteel Southern facade. Widely regarded as one of the finest American dramas of the twentieth century, the play remains a powerful, unsparing study of greed, gender, and the human wreckage left by the pursuit of money at any cost.

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