E-text prepared by Eric Eldred, Clare Elliott, Charles Franks, and the
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
by
Ben Hecht
Preface
It was a day in the spring of 1921. Dismal shadows, really Hechtianshadows, filled the editorial "coop" in The Chicago Daily Newsbuilding. Outside the rain was slanting down in the way that Hecht's ownrain always slants. In walked Hecht. He had been divorced from our stafffor some weeks, and had married an overdressed, blatant creature calledPublicity. Well, and how did he like Publicity? The answer was written inhis sullen eyes; it was written on his furrowed brow, and in the savageway he stabbed the costly furniture with his cane. The alliance withPublicity was an unhappy one. Good pay? Oh yes, preposterous pay.Luncheons with prominent persons? Limitless luncheons. Easy work, shorthours, plenteous taxis, hustling associates, glittering results. But—buthe couldn't stand it, that was all. He just unaccountably, illogically,and damnably couldn't stand it. If he had to attend another luncheon andeat sweet-breads and peach melba and listen to some orator pronounce aspeech he, Hecht, had written, and hear some Magnate outline a campaignwhich he, Hecht, had invented … and that wasn't all, either….Gentlemen, he just couldn't stand it.
Well, the old job was open.
Ben shuddered. It wasn't the old job that he was thinking about. He had anew idea. Something different. Maybe impossible.
And here followed specifications for "One Thousand and One Afternoons."The title, I believe, came later, along with details like the salary. Hangthe salary! I doubt if Ben even heard the figure that was named. He merelysaid "Uh-huh!" and proceeded to embellish his dream—his dream of adepartment more brilliant, more artistic, truer (I think he said truer),broader and better than anything in the American press; a literarythriller, a knock-out … and so on.
So much for the mercenary spirit in which "One Thousand and One
Afternoons" was conceived.
A week or so later Ben came in again, bringing actual manuscript for eightor ten stories. He was haggard but very happy. It was clear that he hadsat up nights with those stories. He thumbed them over as though he hatedto let them go. They were the first fruits of his Big Idea—the idea thatjust under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news oftenflatly and unimaginatively told, lay life; that in this urban life theredwelt the stuff of literature, not hidden in remote places, either, butwalking the downtown streets, peering from the windows of sky scrapers,sunning itself in parks and boulevards. He was going to be itsinterpreter. His was to be the lens throwing city life into new colors,his the microscope revealing its contortions in life and death. It was nonewspaper dream at all, in fact. It was an artist's dream. And it hadbegun to come true. Here were the stories…. Hoped I'd like 'em.
"One Thousand and One Afternoons" were launched in June, 1921. They werepresented to the public as journalism extraordinary; journalism thatinvaded the realm of literature, where in large part, journalism reallydwells. They went out backed by confidence in the genius of Ben Hecht.This, if you please, took place three months before the publication of"Erik Dorn," when not a few critics "discovered" Hecht. It is not too muchto say that the first full release of Hecht's literary powers was in "OneThousand and One Afternoons." The sketches themselves reveal his creativedeli