A Child of the Century

By Ben Hecht

Published by: Dutton Adult (1985)

ISBN: 091765742X

Condition: Very good. Not available in the UK.

Ben Hecht was a prolific writer of screenplays, novels and short stories. Born in the 1890s to Belarussian-Jewish immigrant parents in New York City, he started a successful career as a journalist working for several Chicago newspapers. He is credited, alone or in collaboration, for the screenplays of some seventy films and worked with the biggest Hollywood names of the interwar years: Josef von Sternberg, Howard Hawks, David O. Selznick, Ernst Lubitsch and Alfred Hitchcock. He was also very active in the American Civil Rights movement and became a committed Zionist. The proceeds of a play written by Hecht were used to buy a ship, named the SS Hecht, to carry 900 Holocaust survivors to Palestine. A Child of the Century, his autobiography, was published in 1954 to critical acclaim with praise for the ‘vibrant and candid’ writing style although critics suspected that some of the anecdotes were ‘juiced’. As Norman Mailer commented, Hecht ‘was never a writer to tell the truth when a concoction could put life in his prose.‘