Adina Hoffman on 'Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures'

In Ben Hecht: Fighting Words, Moving Pictures, Adina Hoffman explores the career of a Jewish writer whose language was the American vernacular. A novelist who titled his autobiography A Child of the Century, Hecht was also a newspaperman — “1001 Afternoons in Chicago” (about not grand headlines but marginal lives) — and playwright—The Front Page — but his career reached its greatest heights in film, beginning with Josef von Sternberg’s Underworld. Hecht did not even appreciate the art form he soared in with Scarface, Design for Living, Twentieth Century, Barbary Coast, Spellbound, Notorious, and Ride the Pink Horse, to name only some of what was even credited. Adina Hoffman talks about her book about a man of multitudes who became an ardent Zionist as well.