The Snickersnee Press

This website specializes in Ben Hecht, especially his Chicago youth as journalist and his less known career as a piioneering modernist playwright. Known now for his collaboration with Charles MacArthur on The Front Page, Hecht was a collaborator long before that in a seemingly unlikley working partnership with Chicago high society playwright Kenneth Sawyer Goodman. Together they wrote some dozen plays including five "ghetto plays" Hecht drafted drawing from experiences of his extended family in the Jewish immigrant neighborhoods of Chicago.

At the end of this month, Novemebr 2018 we observe the 100th Anniversary of the young death of Ben Hecht's Chicago collaborator of the 1910s Kenneth Sawyer Goodman.