1001 Afternoons in Chicago

by Pa Rock

Reader

Ben Hecht was perhaps the most prolific screenwriter of his generation, and many of the movies from the 1930's and 1940's were either written by, or in collaboration with, him - although he was not always credited for his efforts.  (He did receive writing credits on seventy films.)  Hecht won an Oscar for his writing at the very first Academy Awards in 1929, and he was nominated for best writer five more times over the following years.  Ben Hecht was also a novelist, an actor, and he wrote plays that were produced on Broadway.    When television began to crowd into the entertainment field in the 1950's, his works had a strong presence there as well.  

My personal favorite work by Ben Hecht is his play, "The Front Page," which has had several incarnations on the silver screen, including one version starring Carol Burnett.  "The Front Page" also formed the basic storyline of the 1940 hit movie, "His Girl Friday" starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell.  It is, as the title implies, a story about the newspaper business, and it is set in the rough-and-tumble world of prohibition-era Chicago.  Ben Hecht had no difficulty in writing about that place and that time, because in the early 1920's he was a reporter ferreting out news stories in the streets and back alleys of Chicago, one of the wildest cities in America. 

In 1920 Ben Hecht was working as a reporter for the "Chicago Daily News" when he suddenly decided to give up the newspaper game and move into the more lucrative writing field of "publicity."   He did make more money in the field of publicity, and he met many wealthy, connected, and interesting individuals.  But Hecht quickly began to miss his old life at the newspaper, and his old editor sorely missed him.  Ben approached the editor on the idea of returning to the newspaper, but said that he wanted to do it on his terms.  He wanted to write a daily column about the real people who lived and worked in Chicago, and he wanted the column to be more "literary" in nature than just the standard short and choppy newspaper writing.  Hecht had an established following among the readers of the "Chicago Daily News," and the editor wanted him back, so he basically gave Hecht a blank check to write whatever he wanted.

In the spring of 1921 - exactly one century ago - Ben Hecht and his by-line returned to his old paper along with his new daily column, "1001 Afternoons in Chicago."  In that space Hecht profiled a wide assortment of denizens of the nation's second largest city, from all strata of society.  His sketches included immigrants working to succeed in a strange land, prostitutes, tattoo artists, auctioneers, great financiers, playboys, fraudsters, ex-cons, and anyone who looked like they had a story to tell.   He discovered many of his subjects by just walking the streets and being on the lookout for characters who seemed a little out of place, and his readers also sent him hundreds of suggestions about odd individuals whom they had observed.

More than a year after the daily effort began, sixty-four of Ben Hecht's character sketches were selected to form a book entitled "1001 Afternoons in Chicago," and it was superbly (and amply) illustrated by Herman Rosse.  The resulting book is a masterpiece of American history that takes the reader back to those wild and raucous days when the Windy City was run by felonious types like Al Capone and Lucky Luciano, but it was made functional by the people like those whom Ben Hecht wrote about.  Many of the Chicago characters that he profiled undoubtedly went on to influence his characters in movie and televisions scripts and on the stage.

"1001 Afternoons in Chicago" is history as illuminated through the lives of real people.  It is educational and engrossing, and it paints a very vivid portrait of what life on the streets was like a century ago in a major American city.

It's a good read.