American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, novelist, "the Shakespeare of Hollywood", who received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some 70 films. A prolific storyteller, Ben Hecht authored 35 books and created some of the most entertaining screenplays or plays, among them The Front Page with Charles MacArthur (also filmed as His Girl Friday), Twentieth Century, Underworld, Notorious, The Scoundrel (as play All He Ever Loved), Some Like It Hot etc.

"There is a basic and never varying reason behind all my short story writing. It is this—I write to cheer myself up. I know the world well and it fills me with an ugly mood. The stupidity of humans and their horrid incompetence toward life is a theme with which I have wrestled in many of my books. " ('Some Introductory Thoughts,' The Collected Stories of Ben Hecht, Prefaced by the Author, New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1943, p. vii)

Ben Hecht was was born in New York, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. His parents, Joseph Hecht, a garment worker, and Sarah Swernofsky, were born in Minsk, Belarus; they spoke Yiddish. Later the family moved to Chicago and then to Racine, Wisconsin, where Hecht attended high school. In Racine Joseph gained success as a desingner of women's clothes. (The Tenement Saga: The Lower East Side and Early Jewish American Writers by Sanford Sternlicht, 2004, p. 108) Sarah operated a store, the Paris Fashion.

Hecht read voraciously from an early age, from Poe to Dumas to Gorky, and in addition, at the age of 12, he performed as a circus acrobat. "Ben was always where the action was and wherever Ben was, there was action," recalled one of his classmates.  (The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist by Julien Gorbach, West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press, 2019, p. 3) After a brief period at the University of Wisconsin, Hecht moved to Chicago. He worked as a reporter for Chicago Journal and Chicago Daily News, and contributed to literary magazines, including the Little Review.

After World War I Hecht was sent by Chicago Daily News to Berlin to witness the revolutionary movements. The stay gave him material for his first novel, Erik Dorn (1921), drawn from his early unpublished manuscripts, Moise and Grimaces. The title character, Hecht's alter ego, is a journalist, who states: "There are two kinds of newspapermen – those who try to write poetry and those who try to drink themselves to death."

While in Berlin, Hecht became close friends with the artist George Grosz and was a guest of honour at a famous Data demonstration: a race of six typewriters and six sewing-machines, accompanied by a swearing contest. At the hotel Adlon, which was the headquarters of the American press, Hecht also showed his talents as a musician: "The host, whom everyone called Benny [Hecht], sat cross-legged on top of the piano playing "Everybody Shimmies Now" on a fiddle. His wife accompanied him. There was glasses everywhere and ashtrays filled to the brim with butts; on our table were Havanas, cigarettes, two long-necked Rhine-wine bottles on ice, a quarter-full bottle of Black & White and a bottle of Cognac. A gigantic tin near the piano was said to contain ship's biscuits. . . . towards four in the morning Benny started to conduct the band, and taught the pianist to play ragtime." (A Small Yes and a Big No: The Autobiography of  George Grosz, translated by Arnold J. Pomerans, Feltham: Zenith Books, 1982, p. 106)

A daily column, 101 Afternoons in Chicago, later collected in a book, brought Hecht fame. In March 1923, he called Chicago in the Chicago Literary Times "the pious, subnormal, fatheaded Rube town with the dirtiest streets in the world, the worst taste, the least manners, the most murderers on earth." (quoted in The Damndest Radical: The Life and World of Ben Reitman, Chicago's Celebrated Social Reformer, Hobo King, and Whorehouse Physician by Roger A. Bruns, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987, p. 230)

By the early 1920s, Hecht had established his reputation in the literary scene as a reporter, columnist, short story writer, and novelist. He was passionately interested in Gide, Proust, and Nietzsche, and considered Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Idiot (1868) to be the best novel of all times. Of the American writer, Hecht had admired Sherwood Anderson, but their friendship ended in a quarrel. Its cause has never been clearly explained by either writer. Anderson was portrayed in Erik Dorn under the name Warren Lockwood, a middle-aged midwestern novelist, but in a favorable light.

Hecht left the News and founded in 1923 his own newspaper The Chicago Literary Times. New art and architecture fascinated him, and he published several articles about the aesthetics of urban environment. His enthusiasm bore a far resemblance to the ideas formulated in Marinetti's Manifesto of Futurism (1909). In an essay published in 1923, Hecht wrote about the Temple Building in Chicago at Clark and Washington Streets and saw the white body of the building "as delighting to our vanities as were the triumphal figures of gods and goddesses to the conquering legions returned to Rome." (Rediscovering Ben Hecht, Volume 2: Art & Architecture on 1001 Afternoons, Ben Hecht and F.W. Kovan, Snickersnee Press, 2000)

After two years, The Chicago Literary Times left Hecht penniless, and he moved to New York City. A telegram from the screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz, a kindred spirit, brought him to Hollywood, where he eventually became the highest-paid screenwriter in town. From then on Hecht divided his time between movie assignments and New York. Hecht wrote screenplays for Paramount at $50,000 to $125,000 a script. "For many years Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle," he said. "Of the sixty movies I wrote, more than half were written in two weeks or less. I received for each script, whether written in two or (never more than) eight weeks, from fifty thousand to a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars." (A Child of the Century by Ben Hecht, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954, p. 467)

The Front Page (1928), a collaboration with the Chicago newshawk Charles MacArthur, was a comedy-drama set in Chicago. Hildy Johnson is a newspaper reporter. He has left his work, he is going to marry and move to New York. He visits the pressroom of Chicago Criminal Courts Building to bid his friends good-bye. Earl Williams, an escaped murderer, falls in through the window. Earl's stay of execution has been ignored by corrupt officials. Hildy plans to hide Williams with the help of Walter Burns, his managing editor, and expose the civic corruption. They are caught by the sheriff, but Hildy avoids arrest and prepares to leave for the railroad station. Walter presents him with his watch as a wedding gift. To keep Hildy on his staff, Walter wires New York claiming that Hildy stole the watch. (Produced New York, Times Square Theatre, August 14, 1928) - Several film adaptations, among them The Front Page (1931), dir. by Lewis Milestone, starring Adolphe Menjou and Pat O'Brian; His Girl Friday (1940), dir. by Howard Hawks, starring Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell; The Front Page (1974), dir. by Billy Wilder, starring Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau; Switching Channels (1988), dir. by Ted Kotcheff, starring Kathleen Turner, Burt Reynolds.

"Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle. It gets him, however, more jobs. If his movie is bad it will attract only critical tut-tut for him. The producer, director and stars are the geniuses who get the hosannas when it's a hit. Theirs are also the heads that are mounted on spears when it's a flop." ('Let's Make the Hero a MacArthur' by Ben Hecht, in The Penguin Book of Hollywood, edited by Christopher Silvester, London: Penguin Books, 1998, p. 194)

In Hollywood Hecht wrote scripts often with Charles MacArthur, who had also started as a journalist. Their collaboration led among others to the musical Jumbo (with music by Richard Rogers and lyrics by Lorenz Hart), Ladies and Gentlemen, Fun To Be Free, and Swan Song. The pair received an Academy Award nomination for The Scoundrel (1935). For Underworld (1927) Hecht earned an Academy Award. In 1957, Hecht published a biography of his friend Charles MacArthur, entitled Charlie. Moreover, Hecht wrote scripts with Charles Lederer, with whom he developed what had been dubbed "the screwball comedy" genre. One of the most examples is Monkey Business (1952). While making it, Hecht met Marilyn Monroe, and ghostwrote her autobiographical  magazine articles, which later were edited in book form, My Story (1974). (Marilyn: In Words and Pictures by Richard Havers & Richard Evans, New York, Chartwell Books, 2017, p. 101)

With the director John Ford, who worked in the 1930s for Samuel Goldwyn, Hecht cooperated in The Hurricane (1937), an unlucky film project. After first seeing its footage, he said: "I think it stinks." Hecht wrote new dialogue scenes and Ford shot them. In Stagecoach (1939), one of Ford's most famous westerns, Hecht suggested that the character of Ringo (John Wayne in his breakthrough role) is "a kid out of prison."

To Angels Over Broadway  (1940) Hecht added his view about the war in Europe. Douglas Fairbanks Jr asks in his speech: "What happened to the Poles, the Finns, the Dutch? They're little guys. They didn't win...' Rita Hayworth replies, 'They will, some day.'

Hecht's cooperation with Alfred Hitchcock started in Foreign Correspondent (1940), although Hecht's additions were uncredited. Hitchcock was asked about the anti-Nazi and pro-Britain message of the film – United States was still 18 months away from the war. He said that it was all the doing of Walter Wanger and Ben Hecht. Joel McCrea, who played Johnny Jones, a reporter for the New York Morning Globe, explains to a captain of an American ship why he did not tell him he was a reporter: "My dear Captain, when you've been shot down in a British plane by a German destroyer, three hundred miles off the coast of England (latitude forty-five), and have been hanging on to a half-submerged wing for hours, waiting to drown with a half a dozen other stricken human beings, you're liable to forget you're a newspaperman for a moment or two!" (The Complete Hitchcock by  Paul Condon and Jim Sangster, London: Virgin, 1999, pp. 97-98)

Spellbound (1945) was based on the novel The House of Dr. Edwardes by Francis Beeding. In the process of scripting, almost nothing of the novel was left except, remotely, the idea of the villain turning out to be the asylum director, who is of course mad. The eccentric Spanish painter Salvador Dali designed the famous dream sequences. The next film, Notorious (1946), was made with almost exactly the same team – David O. Selznick producing, Ben Hecht scripting, and Ingrid Bergman starring. The film was based on a Saturday Evening Post story called 'The Song of the Flame', which was further developed by Hitchcock and Hecht.

When the script for The Paradine Case (1947) needed rewriting, Hecht was called in, but his additions were uncredited. Hitchcock would have liked Hecht to do script for Strangers on a Train (1951), but the author was otherwise occupied, and the director did get one of Hecht's assistants, Czenzi Ormonde to work with Raymond Chandler.

The director Howard Hawks worked with Hecht in several film projects. Scarface from 1932 was based on Hecht's story. The success of Underword and Scarface allowed Hecht to claim that it was he had invented the gangster movie. (The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist, p. xviii) In Viva Villa (1934), for which Hecht wrote the screenplay, Hawks worked uncredited. Twentieth Century (1934), written by Hecht and Charles McArthur, was directed and produced by Hawks. Other film projects included Barbary Coast (1935), His Girl Fiday (1940), The Outlaw (1943), The Thing from Another World (1951).

Gunga Din (1939), based on a poem by Rudyard Kilping and set in British India, was the most expensive film ever made by RKO. Faulker worked uncredited on the script. This great action adventure is nowadays regarded as politically incorrect. In India the film was banned. The Bombay Chronicle wrote: "The scenarists . . . seen to have heard of Pathas, of Kali, of idols and priests and temples, of elephants, of loincloth and upright British soldiers . . . they have put them all together in a most amazing jumble. It is all like producing a film of Hollywood life and showing glamour girls riding on the back of Alaskan bears and cigar-chewing producers going about with feathers stuck in their hair like the Red Indians!" ('Gunga Din,' in Simon Rose's Classic Film Guide by Simon Rose, Glascow: HasperCollins, 1995, p. 158) Gary Grant, who played one of the leads, knew from his schoolday's Kipling's line, "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din". 

While working with Viva Villa in Mexico, Hecht had an affair with another woman, and when his wife Rose, showed up unannounced, the panicked author turned to Hawks. The director advised: "'You'd better be perfectly honest. Be a reporter and tell her the story of her husband who's down here with another woman and what's she going to do about it?' And he did and by God he got away with it. . . . I think Ben amused me most when he got into a real bind. He enjoyed being the brunt of trouble, it kept him very busy thinking how to get out of it." (Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood by Todd McCarthy, New York: Grove Press, 1997, p. 192)

For the comedy His Girl Friday Hawks could not hire Hecht – he was busy doing uncredited rewrites with the produced David Selznick for Victor Fleming on Gone with the Wind, and preparing Angels over Broadway. The major change compared to the Broadway production was the sex change. Hildy Johnson (Rosalind Russell) became the ex-wife of Walter Burns (Cary Grant) – they had been married and divorced but Burns schemes to get Hildy back.

Hecht's 'Letter to the Terrorists of Palestine,' first published in the New York Post, May 15, 1947, appeared in more than dozen newspapers. He declared: "Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad train sky high, or rob a British bank or let go with your guns and bombs at the British betrayals and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts." (quoted in The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist, p. xvii) His criticism of British policies in Palestine and support of the Jewish resistance movement caused that his credits were removed from all films shown in England for some years. In his honor an illegal immigrant ship was named "Ben Hecht." A passionate believer in an independent Jewish state, Hecht advocated swift action; guerrilla war was the best way the clear the way.

A Guide for the Bedevilled (1944), in which Hecht defended his views, gained him many enemies. Later, in his book entitled Perfidy, Hecht acknowledged the death of his of Zionist dream – the work dealt with the events of the "Dr Rudolf Kastner trial." The accused, a lawyer and fanatical Zionist, collaborated with Adolf Eichmann ("the little German burgher at his desk," as Hecht described him) during the war. Kastner left the members of his community, Hungarian Jews, in the hands of the Nazis because he felt that rescuing them would interfere with establishment of the state of Israel.

Due to the politically charged subject, Hecht's book was banned in Israel. Kastner was assassinated in Tel Aviv by an Israeli undercover agent. Kenneth A. Alford and Theodore P. Savas have suggested in Nazi Millionaires: The Allied Search for Hidden SS Gold (2002) that the circumstances of Hecht's death were suspicious.

Hecht was married twice, first in 1915 and after divorce in 1925. His daughter Jenny from his second marriage achieved success as an actress from the age of eight. She apparently was in Actors and Sin (1952) a 9-year-old girl who writes a steamy screenplay for a movie expected to became the next "Gone with the Wind." The film, written and directed by Hecht, received bad reviews. "A depressing double bill," said Lindsay Anderson. The first movie that Kirk Douglas' the Bryna Company produced was The Indian Fighter (1955), based on the screenplay by Hecht and Frank Davis. The Indian Western, perhaps best remembered for Elsa Martinelli's bathing scene, did well and helped to launch other film projects for the company.

Ben Hecht died of a heart attack on April 19, 1964, while working on the script of Casino Royale (1967). He received no screen credits. Among productions credited to other writers are Queen Christina, Gone With the Wind, Foreign Correspondent, The Outlaw, Lifeboat, Gilda, The Paradine Case, Rope, and Roman Holiday. Hawks bought the story for The Outlaw from Hecht, and began to develop the script with Jules Furthman. Eventually Howard Hughes took over the production and directed the film, starring Jane Russell and Jack Beutel.

Richard Corliss defined Hecht as the personification of Hollywood: "A jumble of talent, cynical and overpaid; most successful when he was least ambitious; often failing when he mistook sentimentality for seriousness, racy, superficial, vital and American," Corliss said in Talking Pictures (1974). (In Capra's Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin by Ian Scott, Lexigton: The University Press of Kentucky, 2006, p. 12)

Famously, Hecht used his Oscar as a doorstop. Acting out his reputation as  the enfant terrible of American letters, Hecht wrote to Hollywood's top executives a Christmas card, in which he said: "Good gentlemen who overpay / Me fifty times for every fart, / Who hand me statues when I bray / And hail my whinneying as Art — / I pick your pockets every day / But how you bastards break my heart." (The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era by Thomas Schatz, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996, p. 190)

For further reading: The Mechanical Angel by Donald Friede (1948); Between You and Me by Louis Nizer (1948); Hanging on in Paradise by Fred Lawrence Guiles (1975); The Five Lives of Ben Hecht by Doug Fetherling (1977); Ben Hecht by Jeffrey Brown Martin (1985); Writers in Hollywood: 1915-1951 by Ian Hamilton (1990); Ben Hecht: The Man Behind the Legend by William MacAdams (1990); Rediscovering Ben Hecht: Selling the Celluloid Serpent, edited by Florine Whyte Kovan (1999); Rediscovering Ben Hecht, Volume II: Art and Architecture on 1001 Afternoons, edited by Florice Whyte Kovan (2000); 'Hecht, Ben' by Daniel Walden, in Encyclopedia of Jewish-American Literature, edited by Gloria L. Cronin and Alan L. Berger (2013); Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures by Adina Hoffman (2019); The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist by Julien Gorbach (2019); A Child of the Century by Ben Hecht with an introduction by David Denby (2020); Nietzsche in Hollywood: Images of the Übermensch in Early American Cinema by Matthew Rukgaber (2022); Ben Hecht's Theatre of Jewish Protest by Garrett Eisler (2025)

Selected works (screenplays alone or in collaboration, novels, non-fiction):

• The "Wonder Hat, 1916 (play; with K.S. Goodman, pub. 1920)
• Hero of Santa Maria, 1917 (play; with K.S. Goodman, pub. 1920)
• The Master Poisoner, 1918 (published in Max Bodenheim's book of poems, Minna and Myself)
• The Egoist, 1920 (play; with K.S. Goodman; pub. 1925)
• Hand of Shiva, 1920 (play; with K.S. Goodman)
• Erik Dorn, 1921 (fiction)
• Fantazius Mallare, 1922 (fiction)
• Gargoyles, 1922 (fiction)
• 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, 1922 (fiction)
• The Florentine Dagger, 1923 (fiction)
• Tales of Chicago Streets, 1924
• The Kingdom of Evil, 1924 (fiction)
• Humpty Dumpty, 1924 (fiction)
• Cutie, A Warm Mamma, 1924 (fiction; with M. Bodenheim)
• The Wonder Hat, and Other One-Act Plays, 1925 (by Kenneth Sawyer Goodman; Ben Hecht)
• The Stork, 1925 (play; from L. Foder)
• Broken Necks, 1926 (fiction)
• Count Bruga, 1926 (fiction)
• The Unlovely Sin, and Other Stories of Desire's Pawns, 1927
• Jazz, and Other Stories of Young Love, 1927
• Infatuation: And Other Stories of Love's Misfits, 1927
• The Sinister Sex; And Other Stories of Marriage, 1927
• The Policewoman's Love-Hungry Daughter: And Other Stories of Chicago, 1927
• Underworld, 1927 (screenplay)
• The Man-Eating Tiger, 1927 (play; with Rose Caylor)
• The Front Page, 1928 (play; with Charles Mc Arthur; filmed several times)
• The Great Gabbo, 1929 (original story; screenplay by Hugh Herbert)
  
• River Inn, 1930 (script)
• The Unholy Garden, 1931 (script)
• A Jew in Love, 1931 (fiction)
• The Champion From Far Away, 1931 (fiction)
• Scarface - The Shame of a Nation, 1932 (screenplay)
• The Great Magoo, 1932 (play; pub. 1933)
• Topaze, 1933 (script, based on Marcel Pagnol's play)
• Design for Living, 1933 (from N. Coward's play)
• Hallelujah, I'm a Bum!, 1933 (story; screenplay by S.N. Behrman)
  
• Twentieth Century, 1934 (play with Charles McArthur; also filmed, adapted from the play The Napoleon of Broadway by Charles Bruce)
• Crime Without Passion, 1934 (story: Caballero of the Law; screenplat by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur)
• Viva Villa!, 1934 (screenplay)
• The Scoundrel, 1935 (film from his own play All He Ever Loved)
• Barbary Coast, 1935 (screenplay)
• Actor's Blood, 1936 (fiction)
• Soak the Rich, 1936 (screenplay; with Charles MacArthur)
• Nothing Sacred, 1937 (screenplay)
• Gunga Din, 1939 (screenplay, based on Rudyar Kipling's poem)
• Wuthering Heights, 1939 (screenplay with Charles McArthur, novel by Emily Brontë)
• It's a Wonderful World, 1939 (screenplay)
• Ladies and Gentlemen, 1939 (play; with Charles McArthur)
• Some Like It Hot, 1939 (play The Great Magoo)
• The Book of Miracles, 1939 (fiction)
• His Girl Friday, 1940 (original play The Front Page)
• Angels Over Broadway, 1940 (also co-dir., prod.)
• Fun to be Free, 1941 (play)
• 1001 Afternoons in New York, 1941
• Lilly Of The Valley, 1942 (play)
• China Girl, 1942 (script)
  
• The Black Swan, 1942 (screenplay, with Seton I. Miller, based on the novel by Rafael Sabatini)
  
• Miracle in the Rain, 1943 (novella; in The Saturday Evening Post)
• A Tribute to Gallantry, 1943 (play)
• I Hate Actors!, 1944 (fiction; as Hollywood Mystery, 1946)
• A Guide for the Bedevilled, 1944 (C. Scribner's Sons)
  
• The Common Man, 1944 (play)
• The Collected Stories of Ben Hecht, 1945
• Watchtower over Tomorrow, 1945 (script)
• Spellbound, 1945 (screenplay with Angus MacPhail; based on the novel The House of Dr. Edwardes by Francis Beeding, pseudonym for John Leslie Palmer and Hilary Aidan St George Saunders, dir. by Alfred Hitchcock)
  
• Specter of the Rose, 1946 (script)
• A Flag Is Born, 1946 (play)
• Notorious, 1946 (screenplay, inspired by the short story 'The Song of the Dragon' by John Taintor Foote, film dir. by Alfred Hitchcock. Killer lines: a cynical Alicia - Ingrid Bergman - says to Devlin - Cary Grant: 'There is nothing like a love song to give you a good laugh.' When they arrive in Rio, she berates Devlin's lack of faith in her: 'Why don't you give that copper's brain of yours a rest? Every time you look at me, I can see it dwelling over its slogans. "Once a crook, always a crook". "Once a tramp, always a tramp". Go on. You can hold my hand, I won't blackmail you for it afterwards.')
• Ride the Pink Horse, 1947 (script)
• Her Husband's Affairs, 1947 (script)
• Concerning a Woman of Sin and Other Stories, 1947 (fiction)
• The Cat That Jumped Out of the Story, 1947 (fiction)
• The Miracle of the Bells, 1948
• Whirlpool, 1950 (screenplay)
• Actors and Sin, 1951 (screenplay)
• Monkey Business, 1952 (screenplay)
• A Child of the Century, 1954 (autobiography)
• The Indian Fighter, 1955 (screenplay with Frank Davis)
• The Iron Petticoat, 1956 (screenplay)
  
• Miracle in the Rain, 1956 (screenplay from his own novel)
• Charlie: The Improbable Life and Times of Charles MacArthur, 1957
• A Farewell to Arms, 1957 (screenplay)
• Legend of the Lost, 1957 (screenplay)
• The Fiend Who Walked the West, 1958 (screenplay from his Kiss of Death)
• Simon, 1958 (screenplay, from Brecht and L. Feuchtwanger)
• Winkelberg, 1958 (play)
• Queen of Outer Space, 1958 (screenplay)
• The Sensualists, 1959 (fiction)
• A Treasury Of Ben Hecht: Collected Stories And Other Writings, 1959
• Perfidy, 1961 (nonfiction)
  
• Simon, 1962 (play)
• Jumbo, 1962 (screenplay based on his play)
• Gaily, Gaily, 1963 (autobiography)
• The Magnificent Showman, 1964 (screenplay)
• In the Midst of Death, 1964 (fiction)
• Letters from Bohemia, 1964 (nonfiction)
  
• My Story, 1974 (with Marilyn Monroe, reprinted in 2000)
• The Ben Hecht Show: Impolitic Observations from the Freest Thinker of 1950s Television, 1992 (edited and adapted by Bret Primack; with a foreword by Mike Wallace)
• Rediscovering Ben Hecht, Volume 1: Selling the Celluloid Serpent, 1999 (edited by Florice Whyte Kovan)
• Rediscovering Ben Hecht, Volume 2: Art and Architecture on 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, 2000 (edited by F.W. Kovan)
• Art & Architecture on 1001 Afternoons in Chicago: Essays and Tall Tales of Artists and the Cityscape of the 1920s, 2002 (book & commentary by F.W. Kovan)
• 101 Hard-to-Find Stories by Ben Hecht. Vol. 1 2008 (Snickersnee Press)
• Hard-to-Find Ben Hecht Stories, Vol. 2, 2010 (Snickersnee Press)
• A Child of the Century by Ben Hecht, 2020 (with an introduction by David Denby)