Hoffman's concentrated biography is smartly entertaining and revelatory.'- Booklist (starred review)

Each phase in Hecht's adventures is electrifying. Alert to the wiles and intricacies of someone who savored his own contradictions, she makes contact with a living personality, creating a portrait both sympathetic and clear-eyed.'-Geoffrey O'Brien, New York Review of Books To boil down such a profuse, not to say verbose, career, into so compact a volume was a challenge, but has achieved much more than elegant concision. Her analysis of his Jewishness is nothing short of a revelation.”-Simon Callow, Sunday Times “Hecht’s life was extraordinary, his writing is (mostly) a tonic, his films are (in the main) dazzling, and Hoffman has brilliantly caught his restless, contradictory quality in crystalline prose. “Hugely readable.”-Danny Leigh, Financial Times It's a big job for such a slender book, but Hoffman . has the grip-the historical, cultural and human frame of reference-required to see Hecht whole.'-Jeremy McCarter, Wall Street Journal The opening credits have barely rolled (so to speak) and we already know that the book is a very unusual sort of Hollywood biography, one about a man who sought a role on the world stage that extended far beyond having written 'Scarface.' The story that Hoffman proceeds to tell-her account of what she vividly describes as Hecht's 'long, slaphappy career'-is little known today, a fact that would have surprised plenty of people when he died in 1964. 'A screenwriter hoping to serve up a punchy opening scene could hardly do better than the first paragraph of Adina Hoffman's new biography of Ben Hecht. Like him, it’s playful, punchy and moves at a real clip.'-Ed Potton, The Times is due a revival, and this short, striking biography could provide it.

She writes with enormous flair.'-David Denby, New Yorker loads Hecht's staggering contradictions into a compact but abounding two hundred twenty pages. Hecht was a renaissance man of dazzling sorts, and Hoffman-critically acclaimed biographer, former film critic, and eloquent commentator on Middle Eastern culture and politics-is uniquely suited to capture him in all his modes. Hecht's fame has dimmed with the decades, but Adina Hoffman’s vivid portrait brings this charismatic and contradictory figure back to life on the page. Whatever the outrage he stirred, this self-declared “child of the century” came to embody much that defined America-especially Jewish America-in his time. During World War II, he also emerged as an outspoken crusader for the imperiled Jews of Europe, and later he became a fierce propagandist for pre-1948 Palestine’s Jewish terrorist underground. He was, according to Pauline Kael, “the greatest American screenwriter.” Jean-Luc Godard called him “a genius” who “invented 80 percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today.” Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts-including Scarface, Twentieth Century, and Notorious-Ben Hecht was known in his day as ace reporter, celebrated playwright, taboo-busting novelist, and the most quick-witted of provocateurs.

A vibrant portrait of one of the most accomplished and prolific American screenwriters, by an award-winning biographer and essayist

Notorious screenwriter ben