Title: A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago
Author: Ben Hecht - Ben Hecht was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist and novelist. He received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some seventy films. He wrote thirty-five books and created some of the most entertaining screenplays and plays in America. "The Dictionary of Literary Biography - American Screenwriters" calls him "one of the most successful screenwriters in the history of motion pictures." At the age of 16, 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 early 20s, Hecht became a noted journalist, foreign correspondent, and literary figure.

A prolific writer, Hecht received the first Academy Award for Original Screenplay, for "Underworld" (1927). Many of the screenplays he worked on are now considered classics. He also provided story ideas for such films as "Stagecoach" (1939). Film historian Richard Corliss called him "the Hollywood screenwriter," someone who "personified Hollywood itself." In 1940, he wrote, produced, and directed, "Angels Over Broadway," which was nominated for Best Screenplay. In total, six of his movie screenplays were nominated for Academy Awards, with two winning.

He became an active Zionist shortly before the Holocaust began in Germany, and wrote articles and plays about the plight of European Jews, such as, "We Will Never Die" in 1943 and "A Flag is Born" in 1946. Of his seventy to ninety screenplays, he wrote many anonymously to avoid the British boycott of his work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The boycott was a response to Hecht's active support of paramilitary action against British forces in Palestine and sabotaging British property there, during which time a supply ship to Palestine was named the S. S. Ben Hecht.

According to his autobiography, he never spent more than eight weeks on a script. In 1983, 19 years after his death, Ben Hecht was posthumously inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame. (Information courtesy of Wikipedia)

Publisher: Covici-McGee
City: Chicago
Year: 1922
Printing Information: Signed Edition
Binding Style: Hardcover
Pagination: 288 pages
Width: 6.25" Height: 8.75"
Book Details: ""One Thousand and One Afternoons" were launched in June, 1921. They were presented to the public as journalism extraordinary; journalism that invaded the realm of literature, where in large part, journalism really dwells. They went out backed by confidence in the genius of Ben Hecht. This, if you please, took place three months before the publication of "Erik Dorn," when not a few critics "discovered" Hecht. It is not too much to say that the first full release of Hecht's literary powers was in "One Thousand and One Afternoons." The sketches themselves reveal his creative delight in them; they ring with the happiness of a spirit at last free to tell what it feels; they teem with thought and impressions long treasured; they are a recital of songs echoing the voices of Ben's own city and performed with a virtuosity granted to him alone. They announced to a Chicago audience which only half understood them the arrival of a prodigy whose precise significance is still unmeasured." (From Henry Justin Smith's preface)
Condition / Notes: This is a scarce author-signed first edition of this collection of sketches on life in Chicago which originally appeared in a Daily News column. The inscription on a blank preliminary page reads "To Leroy Goble / A dear, wholesome / volume of little / value for purposes of / seduction -- and to be / read as a non- / aphrodisiac -- / Ben Hecht."

This antique volume is bound in a mul

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