HECHT, BEN

HECHT, BEN (1893–1964), U.S. novelist and playwright. Born in New York City, Hecht was brought up in Racine, Wisconsin. He rebelled against a college education and after a variety of jobs became a reporter first on the Chicago Journal then on the Chicago Daily News. The year he spent in Berlin as a foreign correspondent inspired his first novel, Erik Dorn (1921), while 1001 Afternoons in Chicago (1922) and Broken Necks (1924) included pieces originally published in the Chicago press. Hecht first came to prominence as coauthor with Charles MacArthur of The Front Page (1928), a tough play about newspaper life. The two writers continued their partnership with a number of very successful film scripts throughout the 1930s and 1940s. Hecht's portrayal of Jews in his earlier works, such as A Jew in Love (1931), was unsympathetic and sometimes even grotesque, but the rise of Nazism, which inspired his antifascist play To Quito and Back (1937), resulted in a sensational change in his attitude. In 1941 Hecht publicly proclaimed his Jewish nationalism and became a leading advocate of the dissident underground organization Irgun Ẓeva'i Le'ummi , whose activities he championed in the American League for a Free Palestine and the Hebrew Committee of National Liberation. His sympathies were made clear in A Guide for the Bedevilled (1944), a controversial analysis of antisemitism, and in A Flag is Born (1946). The "illegal" immigrant ship bought by IẓL after World War II was called Ben Hecht. When during the War of Independence the Israel government ordered the sinking of the Altalena, an Irgun ship loaded with arms which arrived off Tel Aviv and refused to surrender them unconditionally to the Israel government, Hecht, who was one of the organizers of its dispatch, withdrew from further Zionist activity. He nevertheless maintained his sentimental attachment to the Revisionist cause, and manifested his partisanship in Perfidy (1961), a vitriolic attack on david ben-gurion and the Israel "establishment" and an examination of the kasztner affair.   In the course of a 40-year career, Hecht enjoyed success as a controversial writer on many issues. His autobiography, A Child of the Century (1954), was a best seller. His other works include Count Bruga (1926); 20th Century (1932); A Book of Miracles (1939); The Sensualists (1959); Gaily, Gaily (1963); and a book of recollections, Letters from Bohemia (1964). -BIBLIOGRAPHY: J. Mersand, Traditions in American Literature… (1939), 112–7; O. Cargill, Intellectual America (1941), 503–6; S. Liptzin, Jew in American Literature (1966), 188–90. ADD. BIBLIOGRAPHY: G. Fetherling, The Five Lives of Ben Hecht (1977); W. Mac-Adams, Ben Hecht (1995). (Joseph Mersand)