Ben Hecht

From the Writer's Almanac at Minnesota Public Radio:

It's the birthday of playwright and novelist Ben Hecht, born in New York City (1893). He was a child prodigy on the violin and gave his first concert performance when he was 10 years old. He also trained as an acrobat and performed with a small circus until he was 16, when he ran away to Chicago and became a journalist. Of his first few years in Chicago he said, "I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fly belly could hold, learned not to sleep... and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me."

Hecht got involved in the Chicago literary renaissance, along with writers like Sherwood Anderson and Theodore Dreiser. He published his first novel in 1921—Erik Dorn, about a jaded journalist who can only speak in newspaper headlines. He also began writing and collaborating on plays. He didn't have any success until he and a newspaper reporter named Charles MacArthur decided to write a play about the newspaper industry called The Front Page (1928). It was a big success on Broadway, and it was later made into the movie His Girl Friday (1940).

Ben Hecht said, "Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock."

I read Erik Dorn a while back, and though I enjoyed it at the time, the book really hasn't stuck with me. On the other hand, I read his A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago, a wonderful collection of his newspaper columns, even longer ago, and many of the pieces remain lodged within my consciousness--which for me is always a sign of a great book. I highly recommend the latter.