On the road much of the time, his father did not have much effect on Hecht's childhood, and his mother was busy managing a store in downtown Racine. When Hecht was in his early teens, he would spend the summers with an uncle in Chicago. For his bar mitzvah, his parents bought him four crates full of the works of Shakespeare, Dickens and Twain. The family moved to Racine, Wisconsin, where Ben attended high school. His father and mother, Sarah Swernofsky Hecht, had emigrated to New York from Minsk, Russian Empire. His father, Joseph Hecht, worked in the garment industry.
Hecht was born in New York City, the son of Belarusian-Jewish immigrants. 3.3 Supporting allies during World War II.
In 1983, 19 years after his death, Ben Hecht was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. According to it, unlike journalism, he did not hold screenwriting in high esteem, and never spent more than eight weeks on a script. In 1954, Hecht published his highly regarded autobiography, A Child of the Century. The boycott was a response to Hecht's active support of paramilitary action against British Mandate for Palestine forces, during which time, a Zionist force's supply ship to Palestine was named the S.S. Thereafter, he wrote many screenplays anonymously to avoid a British boycott of his work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Motivated by what became the Holocaust-the mass-murder of Jews in Europe-Hecht wrote articles and plays, such as We Will Never Die in 1943 and A Flag is Born in 1946. Hecht became an active Zionist (supporter of a Jewish "national home" in Palestine) after meeting Peter Bergson, who came to the United States near the start of World War II. In total, six of his movie screenplays were nominated for Academy Awards, with two winning. In 1940, he wrote, produced, and directed Angels Over Broadway, which was nominated for Best Screenplay. Film historian Richard Corliss called him " the Hollywood screenwriter", someone who "personified Hollywood itself". He also provided story ideas for such films as Stagecoach (1939). Many of the screenplays he worked on are now considered classics. Hecht received the first Academy Award for Best Story for Underworld (1927). The Dictionary of Literary Biography – American Screenwriters calls him "one of the most successful screenwriters in the history of motion pictures". In the late 1920s, his co-authored, reporter-themed play, The Front Page, became a Broadway hit. He received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some seventy films.Īfter graduating from high school in 1910, Hecht ran away to Chicago, where, in his own words, he "haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls, and bookshops." In the 1910s and 1920s, Hecht became a noted journalist, foreign correspondent, and literary figure. A successful journalist in his youth, he went on to write 35 books and some of the most enjoyed screenplays and plays in America. Ben Hecht ( / h ɛ k t/ Febru – April 18, 1964) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist.
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