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Short stories, a play, and TV script.
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 a...
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.”
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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 propag...
On February 15, 1958, writer Ben Hecht (1893-1964), a flamboyant and caustic social critic, appeared on The Mike Wallace Interview. Wallace and his producer, Ted Yates, agreed that Hechts personality was provocative enough to be the basis of a television show. The Ben Hecht Show was born. For 22 weeks, Ben Hecht held forth on a variety of subjects, enraging some, engaging many. Here is a sample of Hechts stories and essays from his short-lived television show. Entertaining, defiant, realistic, and iconoclastic, these are the impolitic thoughts of a man who tried to awaken the public from the "optical opiate" of 1950s television.
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 te...