A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago

by Ben Hecht

Overview

'Mr. Hecht is attempting to do for Chicago something of what Dickens did for London; he stands appalled before the spectacle of the streets with their tumultuous, mysterious throngs.' --'New York Times'

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781449552794
Publisher:	CreateSpace Publishing
Publication date:	02/02/2010
Pages:	268
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.61(d)

About the Author

Ben Hecht (February 28, 1894 - April 18, 1964), was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, and novelist. Called "the Shakespeare of Hollywood", he received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some 70 films and as a prolific storyteller, authored 35 books and created some of the most entertaining screenplays or plays in America. According to film historian Richard Corliss, he was "the" Hollywood screenwriter, someone who "personified Hollywood itself." The Dictionary of Literary Biography - American Screenwriters, calls him "one of the most successful screenwriters in the history of motion pictures." He was the first screenwriter to receive an Academy Award for Original Screenplay, for the movie Underworld (1927). The number of screenplays he wrote or worked on that are now considered classics is, according to Chicago's Newberry Library, "astounding," and included films such as, Scarface (1932), The Front Page, Twentieth Century (1934), Barbary Coast (1935), Stagecoach, Some Like It Hot, Gone with the Wind, Gunga Din, Wuthering Heights, (all 1939), His Girl Friday (1940), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Monkey Business, A Farewell to Arms (1957), Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), and Casino Royale (posthumously, in 1967). In 1940, a film he wrote, produced, and directed, Angels Over Broadway, was nominated for Best Screenplay. Six of his movies overall were nominated for Academy Awards, with two winning.

Table of Contents

A Self-Made Man
An Iowa Humoresque
An Old Audience Speaks
Clocks and Owl Cars
Confessions
Coral, Amber and Jade
Coeur De Lion and The Soup and Fish
Dapper Pete and The Sucker Play
Dead Warrior
Don Quixote and His Last Windmill
"Fa'n Ta Mig!"
Fanny
Fantastic Lollypops
Fog Patterns
Grass Figures
Ill-Humoresque
Jazz Band Impressions
Letters
Meditation in E Minor
Michigan Avenue
Mishkin's Minyon
Mottka
Mr. Winkelberg
Mrs. Rodjezke's Last Job
Mrs. Sardotopolis' Evening Off
Night Diary
Nirvana
Notes For a Tragedy
On A Day Like This
Ornaments
Pandora's Box
Pitzela's Son
Queen Bess' Feast
Ripples
Satraps At Play
Schopenhauer's Son
Sergt. Kuzick's Waterloo
Sociable Gamblers
Ten-Cent Wedding Rings
The Auctioneer's Wife
The Dagger Venus
The Exile
The Great Traveler
The Indestructible Masterpiece
The Lake
The Little Fop
The Man From Yesterday
The Man Hunt
The Man With a Question
The Mother
The Pig
The Snob
The Soul of Sing Lee
The Sybarite
The Tattooer
The Thing In The Dark
The Watch Fixer
The Way Home
Thumbnail Lotharios
Thumbs Up and Down
To Bert Williams
Vagabondia
Waterfront Fancies
Where The "Blues" Sound
World Conquerors

Editorial Reviews

"Hecht's youthful journalism remains both movving and dazzling. He sided with the scrappy underdog and was endlessly alert to the moods of the great city that was his subject. . . . Saul Bellow read this book while still in high school and would always remember it, maybe because Hecht's sketches, while sometimes gritty and violent in content, also present a quest for lyricism and hope."

Los Angeles Times - Richard Rayner

The columns in 1,001 Afternoons inChicago are scruffy time capsules of an earlier Chicago, an era that is long gone but still recognizable to readers' imaginations. Michigan Avenue, Lake Michigan, street names such as Dearborn and Adams and LaSalle and Wabansia, places such as the Art Institute of Chicago—they're all here, sprinkled amid Hecht's nervous little haikus of urban life. He calls Chicago ‘a razzle-dazzle of dreams, tragedies, fantasies,’ and his tales capture gorgeous scraps of it, vivid vignettes starring businessmen and hobos and cops and socialites and janitors. . . . Thanks to Hecht, the Chicago of 1922 and the Chicago of 2009 bump into each other, shake hands, exchange greetings. Then, this being Chicago, they go for a drink and talk about old times. New ones too.”

Chicago Tribune - Julia Keller

Hecht's youthful journalism remains both movving and dazzling. He sided wi
— Richard Rayner

Los Angeles Times

The columns in 1,001 Afternoons in Chicago are scruffy time capsules of an earlier Chicago, an era that is long gone but still recognizable to readers' imaginations. Michigan Avenue, Lake Michigan, street names such as Dearborn and Adams and LaSalle and Wabansia, places such as the Art Institute of Chicago—they're all here, sprinkled amid Hecht's nervous little haikus of urban life. He calls Chicago ‘a razzle-dazzle of dreams, tragedies, fantasies,’ and his tales capture gorgeous scraps of it, vivid vignettes starring businessmen and hobos and cops and socialites and janitors. . . . Thanks to Hecht, the Chicago of 1922 and the Chicago of 2009 bump into each other, shake hands, exchange greetings. Then, this being Chicago, they go for a drink and talk about old times. New ones too.”

— Julia Keller

Chicago Tribune