Word: hecht
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...BOOK OF MIRACLES-Ben Hecht-Viking...
Whatever else Ben Hecht may be damned for-and blasphemy is likely to be included-he cannot be accused of writing A Book of Miracles for money. One of Hollywood's highest-paid writers (The Front Page, Let Freedom Ring, etc.), he forswore 15 months' salary to write it. (His movie salary is around $6,000 a week.) But for Hecht it was "fun writing what I want-without having Sam Goldwyn peering over my shoulder." Fun for Hecht has heretofore meant novels like Erik Dorn, Count Bruga, A Jew in Love-gaudy, swashbuckling, ranting books, splashed with...
...Book of Miracles, a collection of lively present-day fairy tales, is the best of the bunch. The satire is sharper, better aimed; Hecht's imagination makes fewer mystic misfires, sparkles more inventively, humorously, humanely...
...Near the Mencken tone of Hecht's early satire is the hilarious miracle which occurs when God liquidates radio broadcasting. He merely turns loose Heavenly static, and radio becomes a nightmare...
Pegler left the American in 1915, worked three years on the Chicago Journal, where he broke in a couple of cubs named Lowell Thomas and Ben Hecht. In 1918 Pegler joined Terry Ramsaye in Manhattan to crash the moving picture business. Ramsaye stuck and became the historian of the industry, but after a few years Pegler was hired at $250 a week by a company which promptly folded. He went back to newspapering, first on the Tribune, then the Daily News, finally the Mirror. When he retired from the Mirror he was writing all the editorials and Editor Emile Gauvreau...