As a writer, Ben Hecht (1894-1964) operated on many fronts and just as many levels. As a Chicago reporter in the wide-open 1920s, he created a frenetic and extravagant style of journalism. Later, he made his mark as a novelist of the bizarre, and was also one of the most popular playwrights of his day. Still later, as a screenwriter and sometime director in the golden age of Hollywood, he left a permanent stamp on films and on movie legend. Hecht was a prolific writer (35 books and twice as many films) and has come to seem just as prodigious in the combined folklore of Broadway, the movie industry and the newspaper business. But the fact that he worked in so many fields simultaneously has tended to blur his reputation. In this introduction to Hecht's personality and works, Doug Fetherling breaks Hecht's career into five overlapping "lives" or phases. First, there are the darlings of the avant garde, Hecht the Iconoclast and Hecht the Bohemian, at war with the ordinary, who brought about a new appreciation of the modern urban sensibility. Next was Hecht the Sophisticate, who mixed a unique concoction of sentiment and cynicism, a blend that remains a feature of his work and of popular culture between the wars. Then there was Hecht the Propagandist, who, in his work on behalf of the Jewish people, managed to alienate all sides of a bitterly fought series of political confrontations. Finally, there was Hecht the Memoirist who, drawing on previous selves, brought new vigor to what is often a stodgy literary form. While the Hollywood Hecht is best remembered today, Fetherling argues that the whole of his work must be viewed before we can gain insight into any of its parts. In so doing, he has written the first serious examination of a writer who, while at odds with his times, is one without whom they would not have been quite the same.--From publisher description.

2019 National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Biography. Ben Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago. His grim experience with what he called “the soul of man” gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe. In 1932, Hecht solidified his legend as "the Shakespeare of Hollywood" with his thriller Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies. But Hecht rebelled against his Jewish bosses at the movie studios when they refused to make films about the Nazi menace. Leveraging his talents and celebrity connections to orchestrate a spectacular one-man publicity campaign, he mobilized pressure on the Roosevelt administration for an Allied plan to rescue Europe’s Jews. Then after the war, Hecht became notorious, embracing the labels “gangster” and “terrorist” in partnering with the mobster Mickey Cohen to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the fight for a Jewish state. The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is a biography of a great twentieth-century writer that treats his activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. It details the story of how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at this pivotal moment in history, about the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in American media, and about the consequences. Who else but Hecht could have drawn the admiration of Ezra Pound, clowned around with Harpo Marx, written Notorious and Spellbound with Alfred Hitchcock, launched Marlon Brando’s career, ghosted Marilyn Monroe’s memoirs, hosted Jack Kerouac and Salvador Dalí on his television talk show, and plotted revolt with Menachem Begin? Any lover of modern history who follows this journey through the worlds of gangsters, reporters, Jazz Age artists, Hollywood stars, movie moguls, political radicals, and guerrilla fighters will never look at the twentieth century in the same way again.

Ben Hecht's critically acclaimed autobiographical memoir, first published in 1954, offers incomparably pungent evocations of Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s, Hollywood in the 1930s, and New York during the Second World War and after. "His manners are not always nice, but then nice manners do not always make interesting autobiographies, and this autobiography has the merit of being intensely interesting."--Saul Bellow, New York Times Named to Time's list of All-Time 100 Nonfiction Books, which deems it "the un-put-downable testament of the era's great multimedia entertainer."

An irresistible comedy with thrills and derring do set in the news room. Hildy wants to break away from journalism and go on a belated honeymoon. There is a jailbreak and into Hildy's hands falls the escapee as hostage. He conceals his prize in a rolltop desk and phones his scoop to his managing editor. Their job is to prevent other reporters and the sheriff from opening the desk and finding their story. Some hoodlums are enlisted to remove the desk, but they get mixed up with a Boy Scout troop and the mayor and a cleaning woman, among others. It's a whirlwind wrap up with Hildy finally making his breakaway, but the cynical managing editor has him arrested before he leaves town for having stolen a watch he planted on Hildy.

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, a vibrant portrait of one of the most accomplished and prolific American screenwriters, by an award-winning biographer and essayist He was, according to Pauline Kael, "the greatest American screenwriter." Jean-Luc Godard called him "a genius" who "invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today." Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts--including Scarface, Twentieth Century, and Notorious--Ben Hecht was known in his day as ace reporter, celebrated playwright, taboo-busting novelist, and the most quick-witted of provocateurs. During World War II, he also emerged as an outspoken crusader for the imperiled Jews of Europe, and later he became a fierce propagandist for pre-1948 Palestine's Jewish terrorist underground. Whatever the outrage he stirred, this self-declared "child of the century" came to embody much that defined America--especially Jewish America--in his time. Hecht's fame has dimmed with the decades, but Adina Hoffman's vivid portrait brings this charismatic and contradictory figure back to life on the page. Hecht was a renaissance man of dazzling sorts, and Hoffman--critically acclaimed biographer, former film critic, and eloquent commentator on Middle Eastern culture and politics--is uniquely suited to capture him in all his modes. About Jewish Lives: Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present. In 2014, the Jewish Book Council named Jewish Lives the winner of its Jewish Book of the Year Award, the first series ever to receive this award. More praise for Jewish Lives: "Excellent" -New York Times "Exemplary" -Wall St. Journal "Distinguished" -New Yorker "Superb" -The Guardian