Ben Hecht

From Grokipedia

Ben Hecht (February 28, 1894 – April 18, 1964) was an American journalist, novelist, playwright, and screenwriter whose prolific career spanned newspapers, Broadway, and Hollywood, alongside his later commitment to militant Zionist causes supporting groups like the Irgun.

Hecht started as a crime reporter in Chicago, where his experiences informed works like the 1928 play The Front Page, co-written with Charles MacArthur, which satirized journalistic ethics and became a cornerstone of American theater. In Hollywood, despite his public disdain for the industry, he contributed to over 80 films, earning the first Academy Award for Best Original Story for Underworld (1927) and scripting influential crime dramas such as Scarface (1932) and Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious (1946).

During World War II and its aftermath, Hecht shifted focus to Jewish rescue efforts and Zionist militancy, collaborating with the Bergson Group to produce pageants like We Will Never Die (1943) that highlighted the Holocaust and pressured U.S. policy, while raising funds for arms to the Irgun in Palestine; his support for armed resistance against British rule, including a 1947 open letter endorsing insurgents as "men of honor and courage," drew sharp rebukes from mainstream Jewish organizations and British authorities. Hecht withdrew from activism after the 1948 Altalena incident, in which Israeli forces shelled an Irgun arms ship, but his writings, including the controversial A Guide for the Bedeviled (1944) on antisemitism's roots, reflected a caustic critique of institutional complacency toward Jewish suffering.

In brief

Ben Hecht (; February 28, 1894 – April 18, 1964) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, journalist, and novelist. A journalist in his youth, he went on to write 35 books and some of the most enjoyed screenplays and plays in America. He received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some seventy films, including six Academy Award nominations and two wins.

After graduating from high school in 1910, Hecht ran away from Racine, Wisconsin 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. In the late 1920s, his co-authored, reporter-themed play, The Front Page, became a Broadway hit. The Dictionary of Literary Biography – American Screenwriters calls him "one of the most successful screenwriters in the history of motion pictures".