A web site devoted to Ben Hecht Biography & Works
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Washington, DC 20002
fax: 202 547 0132
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Happy Fathers Day!
Ben Hecht's father Joseph Hecht a designer of women's clothing and a factory owner in Ben's Racine, Wisconsin boyhood, circa 1905.
Photograph courtesy The Newberry Library. Chicago.
May 1, 2018 Chicago.
Chicago Literary Hall of Famer Gwendolyn Brooks: Her Memorial under Construction in South Side Park
The reporterly technique of young Ben Hecht was to approach people in the streets and parks of Chicago and say, “Excuse me, may I ask you a question? I am a newspaper reporter and I was just wondering why you are . . .” and then he would reference whatever they were doing that might provide him a daily human interest story. If he were that young reporter today, he would be at the construction site at Brooks Park in Greenwood where workers are preparing the site for the memorial to the late Gwendolyn Brooks, Pulitzer Poetry winner, Poet Laureate of the United State and inductee to the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame.
Margot Mahon is the sculptor of the child-friendly installation Gwendolyn Brooks: The Oracle of Bronzeville, which includes her circular porch where children may sit with a friendly poet role model.
May 1 Update: Margot reports the log-rolling involved in laying the "stepping stones" around her Brooks installation inasmuch as they were fashioned from sections of a recently fallen tree. Further, and of import to attendees, two food truckers (ice cream and jerked chicken) said they would be there for the dedication.
Dedication of the memorial will be June 7, the 101st birthday of the renowned poet, whose statue will be the first of a woman poet and the first of any African American woman in a Chicago public park. The project is sponsored by the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame, the Poetry Foundation and the Chicago Parks District.
Links: Poet Laureate of the United States ; Sculptor: Sculptor Margot McMahon, Ben Hecht in the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame
Ben Hecht's Human Rights Record
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Mother's Day is soon upon us. See Ben's mom Sarah with Ben and his younger brother, Peter (right)
About the writer of this site. Well, of course, Ben Hecht for his formerly lost stories that I found and reprint here. It's also about time that after 20 years I introduce myself: I am Florice Whyte Kovan, the person who researches and writes this site. By virtue of education in Wisconsin (BA English ; MA+ in Urban Studies), I am an urbanologist, a former teacher of college Sociology. Inspired by my connection with Ben's childhood home in Racine, I managed to become an authority on certain aspects of Hecht's life and works and continue to research, write and speak on them. When awarded a study desk at the Library of Congress, I found all 423 of his Chicago 1001 Afternoons stories, formerly thought to be only the 60 published in 1922, and, as the Snickersnee Press, I produced four annotated and illustrated thematic anthologies of them in two editions: Rediscovering Ben Hecht: Selling the Celluloid Serpent, about his connections to the silent movie business; Art & Architecture on 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, as well as a millennial newsletter The Ben Hecht Story and News. I supported my writing and publishing as a research consultant to book publishers and academic scholars including a Pulitzer laureate and a nominee.
I was the speaker at the University of Chicago's Doc Films' first series organized around a writer, Hecht, instead of a director. I story- boarded Hecht's 1943 pageant We Will Never Die for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and continue as an intermittent volunteer. I was advisor to Hecht's character in the Broadway staging of Hutchinson's Moonlights and Magnolias, the play about Hecht's frenetic two weeks doctoring the Gone with the Wind script with David Selznick.
I am always happy when students, scholars and other writers find my work informative and contact me. I welcome their questions about how they should credit this site as a research source.
Florice Whyte Kovan
May 1:SPRING CLEANING!
After over ten years it's time to weed and tidy up this site; a font error here, a typo there, things needing archiving or updating. I may close down pages needing major work but everything should be complete by the weekend. FW
November 8, 2017
This is Veterans Day week, the Federal holiday to be celebrated Friday. Here is a short story we found in the old Chicago Daily News about a shell -shocked World War I veteran Hecht encountered begging at a Chicago subway station.
"Take this man away. He annoys me. I have worked hard all day. I have
Earlier in 2017:
New York Times, Full Page Advertisement, 1943
Ben Hecht's greatest effort must be remembered as his awareness of the Holocaust of millions of Jews in World War II Europe when other Americans were ignorant, incredulous, or non-responsive. His collaboration with Kurt Weill on the 1943 Holocaust-awareness musical pageant We Will Never Die remains his stirring and frustrating effort to use musical theater to save millions of people in death camps and change world events.
This pageant came to Washington, DC where Eleanor Roosevelt and power brokers of the American government heard Hecht's special plea in which the actors, after the end of the pageant, remained onstage to make their case to take urgent action to save the Jews of Europe.
Florice Whyte Kovan, Hecht biographer/bibliographer, writer of this site.
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Even the most ardent Hecht fans have missed many of these short stories of Chicago, where Hecht's felt his greatest literary inspiration and output. Note Ben Hecht 101 Hard to Find Stories from the Chicago Daily News and the Chicago Literary Times part of my annotated bibliography of his 1001 Afternoons in Chicago stories.
Savor the variety in Ben Hecht 's Chicago literay journalism. Here are four columns from his 1001 Afternoons series, stories I was the first to reprint and now offer online.
Vox Populi, about a homeless World War I veteran
Petrovivacity Feminist silent movie diva Olga Petrova
I Got the Blues Chicago blues scene of the 1920s
Hecht at the Opera with Mr. Prokofiev
You may buy our compilations of the lost stories from his 1001 Afternoons in Chicago newspaper series here for immediate shipping.
Ben Hecht Bio-Bibliographer
Hecht/Kovan: Art & Architecture on 1001 Afternoons in Chicago
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We were reading
John Heartfield and the Agitated Image: Photography, Persuasion and the Rise of Avant-Garde Photomontage, a tour de force illustrated biography by Andres Mario Zevigon (University of Chicago Press).
It includes material about Ben Hecht's days with Heartfield, Georg Grosz and the Dadaists in war torn Berlin 1919 when Hecht was a correspondent for The Chicago Daily News.
Buy the book here. It is beautifully written and informative about John Heartfield’s development of photomontage, the art of the film still and the use of art and design as persuasion,whether ideological or to buy products.
Florice Whyte Kovan
See our 2-fer special:
Rediscovering Ben Hecht: Selling the Celluloid Serpent, FW Kovan's compilation of Hecht's 1001 Afternoons columns about the silent film actors directors and publicity agents of the early 1920s. Buy the pair, one for yourself and one for a friend, or for your friendly neighborhood library.
Good Old News
May 7, 2013.
Chicago area fans of Ben Hecht and others who can get to Chicago's North Side: Buy your tickets to 1001 Afternoons in Chicago by ACM Access Contemporary Music and the Strawdog Theatre.
Tuesday, May 21 7:00 PM
Architectural Artifacts
4325 N. Ravenswood Ave.
May 4, 2013 AND THE STORIES ARE . . .
The six Ben Hecht stories to be dramatized and set to music at a Chicago performance on May 21 in a collaboration between Access Contemporary Music and the Strawdog Theatre of Chicago are:
Grass Figures, Don Quixote and His Last Windmill, Thumbnail Lotharios, The Mother, Dapper Pete and the Sucker Play, and Clocks and Owl Cars, as revealed by ACM composer Seth Boustead , a Hecht aficionado who spearheaded the joint project.
Ben Hecht won the first Oscar awarded to a writer for original story for the silent film Underworld at the first Academy Awards. This Chicago crime story, followed by Scarface established Hecht as the progenitor of the American crime genre in motion pictures. He remained in New York for the first awards ceremony, piqued at how his female character Feathers became mere eye candy instead of the more resourceful woman of his script. She didn't just pose for her big close-ups, she devised a plan to get her man out of prison. His second Oscar was for The Scoundrel, starring Noel Coward.
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Image, Chicago Daily News as seen in our book Selling the Celluloid Serpent.
Florice Whyte Kovan, writer of this web site
101 Hard-to-Find Stories by Ben Hecht
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Ben Hecht's first story to cause a front page sensation hit sixteen years before his Broadway hit The Front Page. It was his scornful Titanic disaster poem "Master and Man." written in real time as the ship was sinking, the rhyme has surfaced in recent literature, but lacking (more)
Archived
Chicago. The Hecht collection at the Newberry Library is in the news, or rather the Times today, in an article about the future of marginalia in a digital age. We can tell you that any thorough biography of Ben Hecht must include information from the scribblings of his wife Rose Caylor in the margins of his books and letters. See Paul Ghel, curator with some Hecht marginalia in the illustrated New York Times article by Dirik Johnson. Scroll down this column for more about Rose.
A less known aspect of Ben Hecht was his work for human rights and civil rights. Read our page about his work against the Klan and his promotion of African Americans in creative work in Chicago and Hollywood.
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When Ben Hecht left Racine, Wisconsin for
a career as a Chicago journalist in 1910, he was probably dressed something like the dapper fellow to the right, in bowler hat and Chesterfield coat, although not necessarily on skates.
Growing up in Wisconsin, Hecht loved
winter sports; an early biographical dictionary cites ice skating as his favorite. He ended his massive memoir A Child of the Century on a happily wintery note with his little daughter Jenny sledding down a hill in Nyack just as he did in his boyhood in Racine. I know that sled hill because, like Ben, I grew up on that hill overloking Lake Michigan, two generations later. His last line in Child is, "Watching her I remember a lad in Racine. My book is done, but it is beginning all over again."
Hecht's poignant and fanciful story about the holiday rush: Holiday Thoughts.
Now Annotated! 101 Hard-to-Find Stories by Ben Hecht
Hecht at the Prokofiev opera opening
Hecht's 50 Books that Are Books.
Above, a glimpse of Florice Whyte Kovan, writer/producer of books about Ben Hecht and the editor of this all-Hecht website. In the background is the Algonquin Hotel in New York, where Hecht was an associate of the Round Table literary set. Photo by Allan Kovan, circa 2000.
Ben Hecht Rediscovered: Notes from the editor, Florice Whyte Kovan
Washington, DC Have you fathomed the remarkable online Authors Calendar, a biographical dictionary of authors written by Petri Liukkonen, former director of the Kuusankosken kirjasto, the library of a dynamic new town in Finland? Liukkonen's English language biographies include notes, bibliographies and quotes capturing the essense of each writer. You may have read many of these pages because they are likely to be high in the search engine rankings, which is where we found an interesting biography of Ben Hecht. The site gets 100 million hits per year with 15 million unique visitors and is designed and managed by Ari Pesonen to provide access to authors alphabetically and by birthday. As we write this on October 29, it is the birthday of detective writer Fredric Brown; October 30 is Ezra Pound; Halloween, October 31, is Keats, and so on. Ben Hecht's birthday is February 28. Photo of the library by Christiane, January 2009.
Archive (?) Date
We hear of Ben Hecht preservation in regard to his script-doctoring of Gone with the Wind. The Theater Guild of Racine, Wisconsin, Hecht's boyhood home, is currently staging Don't Cry for Me, Margaret Mitchell, a play written by V. Cate and Duke Ernsberger. Like Ron Hutchinson's Moonlights and Magnolias, which we saw in Chicago and advised on in New York, the play deals with how, with Hecht's help, David Selznick's languishing movie production of the Margaret Mitchell tome got up and running. Our thanks to Lee Roberts of the Racine Journal Times for citing this website in her piece about the play and Hecht. It is good to see Hecht acknowledged as a Racine writer. See our Racine High School graduation picture of Ben Hecht in the column to the right.
Book of Chicago architecture stories by Hecht now available with color tip-ins.
Art & Architecture on 1001 Afternoons in Chicago: Essays and tall tales of artists and the cityscape in the 1920s. Snickersnee Press. A collection of Ben Hecht's stories compiled by Florice Whyte Kovan. When she laid out this hardcover book in 2003, it was
printed in black and white. Now
available are copies to which she has added the zest of color with hand tip-ins of
Chicago buildings, art and exotic paper. Shipping now. $35.00 on eBay or buy from us directly. Request a PayPal invoice. Libraries may email purchase orders through our Contact Us link, or, fax to 202 547 0132. You may also try calling us at that number to use your MC/V/AMx/Disc We say "try" because this is our shipping site land phone, not staffed all day.
May 10, 2010. This year we observe the 100th anniversary of Ben Hecht as a senior in the Class of 1910 at Racine High School, a college prep school from which Ben 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 to Racine High is the 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. . . ."
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 Ben Hecht's 1001 Afternoons in Chicago book.
IN PRINT!! Art & Architecture on 
1001
Afternoons in Chicago: Essays & Tall Tales of Artists and the Cityscape.
Ben Hecht stories and Florice Whyte Kovan commentary and book. Snickernee Press. Ask about book-store, library or club discounts. ISBN 0-9667709-1-9.
Postcard of Chicago looking west from the Art Instutute, 1910, when Hecht arrived from Wisconsin.
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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, Snickersnee Press 2000.
Composition by Chicago artist Ramon Shiva. Hecht supported him in his arts tabloid. Image courtesy Smithsonian Archive of American Art..
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.
Ben Hecht on his Grant Park bench, where he people-watched and city-watched, getting ideas for his Chicago stories.
Cover of Bibliocityscape, Florice Whyte Kovan's architectural array of Ben Hecht's complete 1001 Afternoons in Chicago titles. Private collection.
Screenwriter Ben Hecht was a bibliophile: Read his list of
"50 Books That Are Books"
Links
NEW! 101 Hard-to-Find Ben Hecht Stories
Snickersnee Press Book Catalog*
Ben Hecht at the Chicago subway *
Ben Hecht wrote Mailyn Monroe's memoir *
Hecht's Front Page Titanic piece *
Hecht on Chicago skyscrapers *
Hecht's circus boyhood and circus movies *
Hecht's story of Chicago cabarets*
Our Free-Lance Research Services at the Library of Congress *
Wallace Smith Fantazius Mallere *
NEW! Ben Hecht annotated bibliography: 101 Hard to Find Stories by Ben Hecht.
THE SNICKERSNEE PRESS PUBLISHES ONLY BEN HECHT (1894 - 1964) BIOGRAPHY AND WORKS. All rights reserved.
My web site of 30 pages is devoted 
exclusively to Ben Hecht. I 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 studies of cultural history: film, modernism, architecture, urbanism and art. I consider Ben Hecht the early screenwriter and literary journalist in Chicago, Ben Hecht the playwright in New York, Ben Hecht the publicist and human rights activist, and yes, Ben Hecht 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, seen left, with Ben and his younger brother, Peter, sold these wares as proprietor of the Paris Fashion store across from 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 (see his graduation portrait above), 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, could UW 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. 
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, to Berlin Dadaists Georg Grosz and Johannes Baader as well as to the European silent film production scene.
On returning to Chicago, he wrote daily columns for the Chicago Daily News in his own series 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, establishing himself as a prolific and inventive short story writer and essayist. He would find some material for these stories by sitting on his favorite park bench in Grant Park, contemplating the urban scene and the profusion of diverse people. The stories are sometimes described (by Eastern critics) as Runyonesque in their character studies, but Ben Hecht inspired the critical term Hechtean in his taboo-breaking youth. During his flourish of literary journalism in the early 1920s, he also completed his major novels, Erik Dorn, followed by Gargoyles, 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 of Chicago.
His "50 Books That Are Books" reading list reveals 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 Paramount Astoria 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 remained 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 albeit wordy 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 wrote. produced and directed films with Charles MacArthur at Astoria Studios in 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 about a mad ballet dancer. He became a New York-Hollywood commuter, maintaining homes in Nyack and Central Park West.
His greatest effort must be remembered as his awareness of the Holocaust of millions of Jews in World War II Europe when other Americans were ignorant or incredulous. Hecht's collaboration with Kurt Weill on the 1943 Holocaust-awareness musical pageant We Will Never Die remains his stirring and frustrating effort to use musical theater to turn world events.
His California mansion was at Oceanside, reflecting a love of the sea Ben acquired in his Racine boyhood.
Library of Congress photograph.
Learn something you didn't already know? If so your credit line should include the writer's name, Florice Whyte Kovan, Snickersnee Press, www.benhechtbooks.net, URL of this page and date.
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431 Fifth Street NE
Washington, DC 20002
fax: 202 547 0132
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