Background
Ben Hecht was born on February 28, 1894 on New York City's Lower East Side. He was the son of Joseph Hecht, a tailor and later a dress designer, and Sarah Swernofsky.
(Copyright 1926 by Ben Hecht. by Boni and Liveright, Inc. ...)
Copyright 1926 by Ben Hecht. by Boni and Liveright, Inc. Same day shipping. Some wear. A Treasure. Some page yellowing.
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(Ben Hecht: 1001 Afternoons in Chicago is a compilation of...)
Ben Hecht: 1001 Afternoons in Chicago is a compilation of more than 60 columns written for the Chicago Daily News that Hecht's editor called "journalism extraordinary; journalism that invaded the realm of literature." The hardboiled audacity and wit that became Ben Hecht's signature as Hollywood's most celebrated screen-writer are conspicuous in these vignettes. Most of them are comic and sardonic, some strike muted tragic or somber atmospheric notes. . . . The best are timeless character sketches that have taken on an added interest as shards of social history. Ben Hecht's collection, as presented in 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, is a timeless caricature of urban American life in the jazz age. From the glittering opulence of Michigan Avenue to the darkest ruminations of an escaped convict, from captains of industry to immigrant day laborers, Ben Hecht captures 1920s Chicago in all its furor, intensity, and absurdity. Hecht's book offers scruffy time capsules of an earlier Chicago, an era that is long gone but still recognizable to readers'' imaginations. Michigan Avenue, Lake Michigan, street names such as Dearborn and Adams and LaSalle and Wabansia, places such as the Art Institute of Chicago--they''re all here. In Ben Hecht's words, Chicago is a razzle-dazzle of dreams, tragedies, fantasies, and his tales capture gorgeous scraps of it, vivid vignettes starring businessmen and hobos and cops and socialites and janitors. . . . Thanks to 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, Chicago of 1922 and the Chicago of 2009 bump into each other, shake hands, exchange greetings. Then, this being Chicago, they go for a drink and talk about old times.
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(524 page red clothbound hardcover book. Publisher-Grosset...)
524 page red clothbound hardcover book. Publisher-Grosset & Dunlap-copyright 1945.
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(Excerpt from The Florentine Dagger: A Novel for Amateur D...)
Excerpt from The Florentine Dagger: A Novel for Amateur Detectives Except for the crackling of the burning wood the room was still. Cowled shadows reared witch like shapes across the walls and ceiling. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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(Publisher: Covici-McGee Publication date: 1922 Subjects: ...)
Publisher: Covici-McGee Publication date: 1922 Subjects: Fantasy fiction, American Fiction / Fantasy / General Fiction / Fantasy / Epic Fiction / Romance / Gothic Notes: This is an OCR reprint. There may be typos or missing text. There are no illustrations or indexes. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million books for free. You can also preview the book there.
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(A book about modern miracles by Ben Hecht.)
A book about modern miracles by Ben Hecht.
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(Pascal Covici, Chicago, 1926. Hardcover. collection of sh...)
Pascal Covici, Chicago, 1926. Hardcover. collection of short stories and character sketches by the legendary mid 20th century prose and screen writer Ben Hecht. Hecht was innovative newspaper columnist, short story writer and novelist who became one of the great screenwriter's of his generation after being snared by Hollywood glamor and paychecks with "Scarface," "Notorious" and his own "The Front Page."
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(Writing in 1943, Hecht cries out for the three million Je...)
Writing in 1943, Hecht cries out for the three million Jews already killed by "ordinary Germans." Called "the most influential writer in the history of American movies," Hecht was shunned both by Hollywood and by most of American Jewry for his stand on saving Europe's Jews.
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(The Kingdom of Evil: A Continuation of the Journal of Fan...)
The Kingdom of Evil: A Continuation of the Journal of Fantazius Mallare Paperback: 211 pages Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 1St Edition edition (1978) Language: English ISBN-10: 015647123X
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Ben Hecht was born on February 28, 1894 on New York City's Lower East Side. He was the son of Joseph Hecht, a tailor and later a dress designer, and Sarah Swernofsky.
Hecht attended Broome Street Grammar School before the family moved to Racine, Wisconsin, where he graduated from high school.
In 1910, having spent only three days at the University of Wisconsin, Hecht quit and went to Chicago, where he got a job on the Chicago Journal. In 1914 he joined the Chicago Daily News, assumed a newsman's cynicism, and soon established a reputation as an imaginative, often outrageous reporter and the best writer on Chicago in the city. As a newspaperman he saw himself as unique, an outsider; as a Jew he struggled all his life with his identity.
Sent to Berlin as a foreign correspondent in 1918, Hecht filed excellent columns on the ferment and chaos of post-World War I Germany. Having discovered dadaism in Europe, he returned to Chicago in 1920 and became part of the Chicago Renaissance. He railed against the tradition and morality of what H. L. Mencken (one of his idols) called the "booboisie" and extolled individualism, experimentation, and liberation. He wrote Erik Dorn (1921), his first and best novel; A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago (1922), a collection of his columns; Gargoyles (1922); and some other works. Together with Kenneth Sawyer Goodmen he also wrote a number of short plays; and in 1917 he collaborated with Maxwell Bodenheim in writing plays.
In 1923 Hecht founded the Chicago Literary Times, a short-lived publication which folded in June 1924. During this most productive and original period of his life, Hecht described, according to Harry Hansen, "the conglomerate mob life of a big industrial city. "
Not long after coming to New York, Hecht began work with Charles MacArthur on The Front Page, which opened on Broadway on August 14, 1928. The play was based on Hecht's knowledge of the older crime scene in Chicago before the Al Capone era, on his relationship with Dion O'Banion, an Italian North Side gangster, and on the frantic, florid, tough journalism of that period. A successful, tautly written drama, it remains the best-known work of both men.
Hecht was equally adept as a screenwriter. Beginning with an original eighteen-page story from which the film Underworld (1927) was shot, he wrote or collaborated on some seventy films, including The Front Page (1931), Scarface (1932), Twentieth Century (1934), Wuthering Heights (1939).
In 1939, reacting to the Nazi Holocaust, Hecht leaped to the defense of Zionism. He wrote columns praising Yiddish writers, was disappointed with Jews who suffered "racial amnesia, " and put on pageants such as A Flag Is Born (1946), which applauded the anti-British terrorist underground in Palestine. After Hecht congratulated the terrorists in a New York Herald Tribune advertisement in 1947, Great Britain boycotted his films and books; the boycott was relaxed in 1952.
Hecht also wrote several hundred short stories and columns. Many of his columns are gathered in A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago and 1001 Afternoons in New York (1941); most of his best stories are in Broken Necks (1924), The Champion from Far Away (1931), The Collected Stories of Ben Hecht (1945), and A Treasury of Ben Hecht (1959). His autobiographies, A Child of the Century (1954), which revealed as much by what was left out as by what was included, described the Chicago he had known, and Gaily Gaily (1963) were best sellers.
In his last years Hecht was as productive as ever. The quality of his literary work declined but his screen scripts improved. When Hecht died in New York City, the Chicago Daily News called him a "One Man Fiction Factory" and the New York Times obituary described him as having had "a genuine instinct for the cinema and a commanding talent for film dialogue. "
(Ben Hecht: 1001 Afternoons in Chicago is a compilation of...)
(The Kingdom of Evil: A Continuation of the Journal of Fan...)
(Publisher: Covici-McGee Publication date: 1922 Subjects: ...)
(Excerpt from The Florentine Dagger: A Novel for Amateur D...)
(Writing in 1943, Hecht cries out for the three million Je...)
(A book about modern miracles by Ben Hecht.)
(524 page red clothbound hardcover book. Publisher-Grosset...)
(Pascal Covici, Chicago, 1926. Hardcover. collection of sh...)
(Copyright 1926 by Ben Hecht. by Boni and Liveright, Inc. ...)
Hecht became an active Zionist shortly before the Holocaust began in Germany.
Quotations:
"Although I am known here and there as a writer not without wit and fecundity, the information is a bit spotty and I can rely little on reader snobbery. "
"Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat. "
"Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away. "
"Love is a hole in the heart. "
"Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. "
"Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos. "
Quotes from others about the person
"If he is occasionally slick, he is also independent, forthright and original. Among the pussy-cats who write of social issues today he roars like an old-fashioned lion. " - Saul Bellow
In November 1915 Hecht married Marie Armstrong, a reporter on the Chicago Journal; they had one daughter.
In 1924 Hecht moved to New York City and the following year he and his wife were divorced. He then married Rose Caylor, also a reporter; they had one daughter.
