Ben Hecht Biography & Works 

Ben Hecht Rediscovered: Notes from the editor, Florice Whyte Kovan

Febbruary 7,,2010

This year we observe the 100th anniversary of Ben Hecht's Class of 1910 at Racine High School, a college prep school from which Ben Hecht graduated  before  beginning his career as a lionized Chicago journalist. Read our bio of  Hecht to the right, where you see a cartoon of him fending off the censor (Barton, 1922) and his high school graduation photo.  The successor school in Racine, Wisconsin is  Washington Park  High School,

December 12 

We invite you to fathom Ben Hecht's Holiday Thoughts as a young reporter "observing" the Christmas season in a Chicago department store and commuter train.  "Traditions are things which take the place of initiative.  And so people lean on them. . .  ."

October 23 

We awakened this morning delighted to find Ben Hecht in a New York Times op ed by Maureen Dowd, who has been reading his memoir Gaily, Gaily.  She cites his story of Miss Van Arsdale in her creative what-to-do about the languishing newspaper industry.  We can tell you that Hecht’s fanciful choice of name for the woman in his account was pay-back for the piracy of an early story of his by a young woman colleague of that name.  In the story's earlier publication in Playboy, the title being Clara,  Hecht used Miss Arsedale as the surname.  So there! 

Hecht expressed delight that Gaily, Gaily was to be the first movie about a screenwriter, himself, or at least his florid memoirs, starring Beau Bridges as young Ben; but Hecht died before he could put his imprint on the lush production.  Our book Art and Architecture on 1001 Afternoons in Chicago includes a film still from the market scene to illustrate Hecht's 1001 Afternoons in Chicago story, A Study in Still Life, about that market.  The scene with Bridges' character about to faint from hunger at a well-stocked sausage booth was not filmed in Chicago but in Milwaukee, where a skyscraper-free background was possible and where local officials were  easier to work with than Chicago polititians for shooting rights, according to production files.  At the time, "gay" meant only carefree so it was in his grave that the homophobic Hecht would have to deal with any changing connotation of the title.   

Buy our books of Hecht's stories       

Modernists alert!  We've published another Ben Hecht' story online, Petrovivacity, wherein the 1910s silent film diva, Olga Petrova, debates life with Herman Rosse, illustrator of Hecht's 1001 Afternoons in Chicago book

IN PRINT!!  Art & Architecture on 1001

Our catalog  Reviews

Ben Hecht won the first Oscar awarder to a writer for original story for the silent film Underworld at the first Academy Awards. With Underworld, followed by Scarface, Hecht established the American crime genre in motion pictures.  His second Oscar was for the more lyical The Scoundrel, starring Noel Coward.  Image below is from the Chicago Daily News.  

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We found all 425 of the1001 Afternoons in Chicago stories written by Ben Hecht.for the old Chicago Daily News! Read Volume One of our new Ben Hecht annotated bibliography 101 Hard-to-Find Stories by Ben Hecht  by  Florice Whyte Kovan.  About this project 

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Ben Hecht worked against the Klan and cast blacks in non-stereotypical roles.  He consulted to the WW II Documenatry, The Negro Soldier.   Ben Hecht and Civil Rights 

 Margaret Anderson, Editor of Chicago's Little Review, launched Hecht with professional care. Image courtesy The Ben Hecht Story & News

Compostion by Chicago artist Ramon Shiva.  Hecht supported him in his arts tabloid. Image courtesy Smithsonian Archive of American Art..

Hecht's first Oscar  was for Underworld, a story about gangland Chicago. Image is seen in our artist book Selling the Celluloid Serpent.

Ben Hecht on violin, right and Charles MacArthur on sax, left. They worked for rival newspapers in Chicago before writing The Front Page together 

Ben Hecht on the movie set A Farewell to Arms, Hollywood.  Courtesy Newberry Library, Chicago as is the one below.

Next Ben Hecht book from Snickersnee 

Ben Hecht Newspaper Vignettes: Commentary, Bibliography & Bibliocityscape

Commentatry by Florice Whyte Kovan.  Washi paper  by Sheila Crider.  Snickersnee Press, 2008

Not your typical book, it has a 66 inch accordion fold spread. 

Libraries may send purchase orders. 

   ISBN 978-0-9667709-5-7

THE SNICKERSNEE PRESS PUBLISHES ONLY BEN HECHT (1894 - 1964) BIOGRAPHY AND WORKS

Our web site of 30 pages is devoted exclusively to Ben Hecht.  We publish researched anthologies of Hecht's 1001 Afternoons stories, with emphasis on the formerly uncompiled ones, which we annotate and illustrate to inform his biography as well as studies of cultural history: film, art, modernism, architecture and urbanism. We consider Ben Hecht as an early screenwriter and literary journalist in Chicago, Ben Hecht the playwright in New York, Ben Hecht the publicist and human rights activist, and Ben Hecht as Hollywood's highest paid and least reverent screenwriter.

 Visit this site and read our books to discover not just the legendary Ben Hecht but also the writer who emerges from the study of his life and newly found works, beginning with his Wisconsin boyhood and his youth in Chicago.       

BEN HECHT BIOGRAPHY HIGHLIGHTS 

BORN IN NEW YORK  CITY in 1894, Ben Hecht was the son of Joseph Hecht and Sara Swernovsky Hecht, garment makers from southern Russia. After several years in Chicago the family moved to the industrial inland seaport of Racine, Wisconsin. Here his father was a working partner in a womens' clothing factory. His mother was the proprietor of the Paris Fashion store across from Monument Square. Ben's Paris Fashion tasks were writing advertising copy, doing window displays and, he tells us, stoking the furnace in the basement under the women's fitting rooms. Shows at Racine's Bijou Theatre exposed young Ben to early films and "illustrated songs" between 1904-1910; but the circus touched him more closely inasmuch as the Hechts lived in a boarding house for circus people.

A Racine High School graduate (see his graduation portrait above), Hecht departed Racine in July of 1910 for a brief introduction to the college scene and fraternity life at the University of Wisconsin. He claims that he was asked to "apologize to the University" at a fraternity dinner table for his boast that he had already read the extensive freshman reading list. What, therefore, he thought, could UW possibly teach him?

ERGO, HE RECALLED in his memoir, A Child of the Century, he fled immediately to Chicago. Particulars remain murky. Clearly, however, he focused on literary attempts and connections early and throve in Chicago as the youngest, most creative and last to "defect" (to New York) of the Midwestern Literary Renaissance authors: Floyd Dell, Carl Sandburg, Max Bodenheim, and Sherwood Anderson, the latter a rival of Hecht and for a time, his room mate. Hecht's real-time muckraking poem about the Titanic disaster appeared on the front page of the Chicago Journal and other papers less than two years after his high school graduation in Racine. Hecht liked to sit on his favorite park bench in Grant Park, where he contemplated the  urban scene and profusion of people, the basis for his stories. 

IN THE MID 1910s Hecht wrote avant-garde plays in Chicago's pioneer little theater movement with Kenneth Sawyer Goodman, namesake of the Goodman Theater. Little Review editor Margaret Anderson, favored Hecht, encouraging his serious literary aspiration as he toiled daily as a reporter, first for the Chicago Journal, then for the Chicago Daily News. Retaining his day job as a celebrity news reporter, he began his screenwriting career no later than 1915 when he teamed with John Emerson and Anita Loos as an uncredited scenarist. In 1919 Hecht served as a post-war correspondent in Berlin, an experience that invigorated him artistically and exposed him to international politics, Berlin Dadaists Georg Grosz and Johannes Baader as well as the European silent film production scene. On return to Chicago, he wrote almost daily 1001 Afternoons in Chicago columns, establishing himself as a prolific and inventive short story writer and essayist accessible to newspaper readers. Sometimes remembered as Runyonesque in his character studies, he inspired the critical term Hechtean in his taboo-breaking youth.  In his flourish of  literary journalism in the early 1920s, he also completed his first book, Erik Dorn, followed by Gargloyes, Fantazius Mallare, The Florentine Dagger, Kingdom of Evil and several plays, among them The Egoist. His arts and literary tabloid The Chicago Literary Times, of which Max Bodenheim was initially co-editor, lambasted Chicago's reactionary arts establishment while promoting the works of Hecht's artist friends George Grosz, Herman Rosse, Wallace Smith, Stanislav Szukalski and the cause of the avant-garde "No-jury" artists.

His "50 Books That Are Books" reading list includes some literature that influenced his later scenario writing

IN 1925 HE RETURNED TO A NEW YORK where the Algonquin Round Table was the locus of literary prestige and, for a time, he took a seat there. His work for New York Paramount Studios during this period was uncredited to evade alimony obligations. When at the first Academy Awards he won the first Oscar ever awarded to a writer for the Hollywood silent film Underworld, he was at home in New York. His initial refusal of the Oscar (he used it as a doorstop when it was later sent to him) set the precedent for more dramatic refusals by other recalcitrant winners over the years. After his success with the stage play The Front Page and his Academy Award for Underworld, Hollywood wooed him with lavish fees. In the 1930s he was writer, producer and director of films with Charles MacArthur at Paramount Astoria Studios in the New York borough of Queens. Despite his iconoclasm and his salty criticism of Hollywood, he won a second Oscar for The Scoundrel, which starred Noel Coward in a roman a clef about the New York publisher Horace Liveright.

HECHT'S FILM CONTRIBUTIONS spanned comedies (Nothing Sacred, Monkey Business) family fare (Jumbo, Roman Holiday), novel to film aptations: Wuthering Heights, Gunga Din, A Farewell to Arms; political satire Hallelujah, I'm a Bum, Roxie Hart (yes, the first screenplay of the blockbuster Chicago), Hitchcock suspense in Spellbound, Rope, Notorious, the latter an Oscar nominee, and, under protest, remedial scripting for Gone with the Wind. Films he directed included Angels over Broadway and the noir Spectre of the Rose. He became a New York-Hollywood commuter, maintaining New York homes in Nyack and Central Park West. Hecht's collaboration with Kurt Weill on the We Will Never Die pageant of 1943 to expose the Holocaust remains a stirring and doomed theatrical effort to turn world events. His California mansion was at Oceanside, reflecting a love of the sea acquired in his Racine boyhood.and Chicago youth.

Vintage postcard of Chicago lakefront skyline. 

Screenwriter Ben Hecht was a bibliophile: Read his list of

"50 Books That Are Books"

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Hecht's Front Page Titanic piece * 

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NEW!  Ben Hecht annotated bibliography: 101 Hard to Find Stories by Ben Hecht.

Happy 2009 with Ben Hecht's Calendar of Works!

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