The Snickersnee Press

 March 6, 2021

The Newberry Library of Chicago is sponsoring a virtual conversation about Ben Hecht “Don’t Let This Get Around”: The Many Lives of Ben Hech between two New York writers:  Film critic David Denby, who wrote the new introduction to Hecht's 1952 autobiography A Child of the Century (Yale Press 2021) AND Adina Hoffman, writer of a book-length interpretation, Ben Hecht, Fighting Words, Motion Pictures (Yale Press, 2019).  The virtual discussion is free and open to all who register.  Save the date Tuesday, March 9. 

About the title of the event, "Don't let this get around" quotes the famously irreverent telegram to Hecht from Herman Mankiewicz urging  him to move to Hollywood, which is of additional current resonance in the light of David Fincher's recent film Mank.  "The many lives of Ben Hecht" evokes Hecht's first  biography "The Five Lives of Ben Hecht (Lester & Orpen Ltd., 1977) which was researched and written by George Fetherling, the distinguished Canadian writer.   

Perhaps because my web provider alerts me that I must upgrade my website platform before March 31--- or else! --- my thoughts go contrary to linger over some of the pathfinding work of the past in Ben Hecht biography and bibliiography. 

In terms of new approaches to Hecht biography, we need go back only to 2019 to find Julien Gorbach’s scholarly book Notorious Ben Hecht.  Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist (Purdue University Press), a version of his PhD dissertation. It would please Ben and certainly his wife Rose to find 80 pages of explanatory footnotes about this remarkable man in the historian’s tradition. Myself, I just read the book backwards, starting with the notes.  The thought-provoking book includes but does not rely on a heretofore less developed look at Hecht’s relationship with the Mickey Cohen and how the hoodlum influenced his militancy.    

Looking back further, I recall receiving a little paperback called Schreiber Theory (Melville House, 2006) from the author, David Morris Kipen. The book shifts the attention from the director to the writer as the person who makes a great film great, a paradigm shift in film studies. Kipen included Hecht in the handful of writers who exemplified the theory behind his manifesto. 

But in  April 2004, some years earlier, Kathy Geier, now a  regularly writer for The Nation,  contacted me from the University of Chicago DocFilms, the venerable film society. She envisioned a selection of films written by Ben Hecht for a series, a radical departure from auteur theory, the canon that the true creator of film was the all-seeing, all-controlling director.  I was honored when she asked me to give the talk to begin her series. I was finding  Hecht’s fingerprints on even uncredited films in similar themes, references or casting similarities sometimes going back to his Chicago days.

The films chosen for the series were the silent film Underworld, for which I found the piano score at the Library of Congress so it could be played at the screening the night of my talk; Design for Living, Hallelujah I'm a Bum, Gunga Din, and His Girl Friday were among the other selections.

I cannot think of that day without remembering the kindness that occurred when Kathy, after taking Allan and me to brunch, had to be at the theater venue and turfed us over to her spouse, Rick. He said he was a great fan of Hecht's memoir Child of the Century and read in it continually to inspire his own prose.  Rick graciously took us to the Hechts’ spacious Queen Ann house in Hyde Park where I was directed up the stair to an enchanting sun-drenched room, Hecht's writing room.  This is where he wrote the 1001 Afternoons stories, and my being privy to it was an unexpected and poignant experience.  I asked Rick what he was writing and he told me it was a biography of Richard Nixon. Thank you, Rick Perlstein (Nixonland,. Scibner, 2008) for making my day!

And from our 2008 archive: 

This summer, selections from the Covici book of Ben Hecht's 1001 Afternoons in Chicago enlivened stages in Chicago and the Midwest as a contemporary music and dance program.  The Hecht stories inspired the original music composed for them by Seth Boustead and Amos Gillespie of Accessible Contemporary Music.  This inspired the the Moving Architects  modern dance troupe in a multi-art tribute to the human condition mused by Ben Hecht's literary journalism.  Venues have included the  Chicago Fine Arts Theater, where Hecht's first play was produced in the 1910s, and the Music Institute of Chicago.  Choreographer/dancer Erin Carlise Norton, heads the dance ensemble.

 Florice Whyte Kovan

The Snickersnee Press Publishes only Ben Hecht (1894-1964) Biography and Works All rights reserved.  Photograph below courtesy The Newberry Library, Chicago. 

This

web

site

is devoted exclusively to Ben Hecht and his literary associates.  We publish researched anthologies of Hecht's 1001 Afternoons in Chicago stories, with emphasis on the formerly uncompiled ones, which I annotate and illustrate to inform his biography as well as to inform studies of cultural history: film, modernism, architecture, urbanism and art. I consider Ben Hecht as the early playwright, screenwriter and literary journalist in Chicago as these experiences informed his later work as a dramatist in New York, and in Los Angeles, where he  became known as Hollywood's highest paid and least reverent screenwriter.    

Visit this site and buy my books online  and 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 salad days 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, while his mother Sarah sold these wares as proprietor of the Paris Fashion store on Racine's Monument Square. Ben's Paris Fashion tasks involved writing advertising copy, doing window displays and, as 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, Hecht writes that he 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 and said, could the University possibly teach him?

ERGO, HE RECALLED -- all of this in his memoir, A Child of the Century, he fled immediately to Chicago. Particulars remain murky. Clearly, however, he focused on his 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, Margaret Anderson, Max Bodenheim, and Sherwood Anderson, the latter a rival of Hecht and for a time, his roommate. 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.  Photo below courtesy The Newberry Library, Chicago 


IN THE MID 1910s Hecht wrote avant-garde and other notable plays in Chicago's pioneer little theater movement with Kenneth Sawyer Goodman

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