A web site devoted to Ben Hecht Biography & Works
431 Fifth Street NE
Washington, DC 20002
fax: 202 547 0132
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A web site devoted to Ben Hecht, by Florice Whyte Kovan, Washington DC. January 2012
The dapper Ben Hecht would have dressed like this in 1910 when he left Racine, Wisconsin for Chicago. An early biographical dictionary states his favorite sport as ice skating. In his memoir A Child of the Century he ends the book on a bright winter note, watching his young daughter sledding down a hill, "I remember a lad in Racine."
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.
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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Ben Hecht won the first Oscar awarded 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.
Hecht's first Oscar was for Underworld, a story about gangland Chicago. Image is seen in our book Selling the Celluloid Serpent.
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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.
THE SNICKERSNEE PRESS PUBLISHES ONLY BEN HECHT (1894 - 1964) BIOGRAPHY AND WORKS. All rights reserved.
Our web site of 30 pages is devoted 
exclusively to Ben Hecht. We publish researched anthologies of Hecht's 1001 Afternoons in Chicago 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, modernism, architecture, urbanism and art. 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 buy our books online or via credit card 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 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, while his mother 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, 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 1943 Holocaust-awareness pageant We Will Never Die 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.
Hecht at his Oceanside, California home. Library of Congress photograph.
431 Fifth Street NE
Washington, DC 20002
fax: 202 547 0132
snickers
