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Ben Hecht, one of Hollywood's and Broadway's greatest writers, won an Oscar for best original story for Underworld (1927) at the first Academy Awards in 1929 and had a hand in the writing of many classic films. He was nominated five more times for the best writing Oscar, winning (along with writing partner and friend Charles MacArthur, with whom he wrote the classic play "The Front Page") for The Scoundrel (1935) (the other nominations were for Viva Villa! (1934) in 1935, Wuthering Heights (1939) (shared with MacArthur), Angels Over Broadway (1940) and Notorious (1946), the latter two for best original screenplay). Hecht wrote fast and wrote well, and he was called upon by many producers as a highly paid script doctor. He was paid $10,000 by producer David O. Selznick for a fast doctoring of the Gone with the Wind (1939) script, for which he received no credit and for which Sidney Howard won an Oscar, beating out Hecht and MacArthur's Wuthering Heights (1939) script.
Born on February 28, 1894, Hecht made his name as a Chicago newspaperman during the heady days of cutthroat competition among newspapers and journalists. As a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, he wrote the column "1001 Afternoons in Chicago" and broke the "Ragged Stranger Murder Case" story, which led to the conviction and execution of Army war hero Carl Wanderer for the murder of his pregnant wife in 1921. The newspaper business, which he and MacArthur famously parodied in "The Front Page", was a good training ground for a screenwriter, as he had to write vivid prose and had to write quickly.
While in New York in 1926 he received a telegram from friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had recently arrived in Hollywood. The telegram read: "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around." Hecht moved to Hollywood, winding up at Paramount, working uncredited on the script for Lewis Milestone's adaptation of Ring Lardner's story The New Klondike (1926), starring silent superstar Thomas Meighan. However, it was his script for Josef von Sternberg's seminal gangster picture Underworld (1927) that got him noticed. From then until the 1960s, he was arguably the most famous, if not the highest paid, screenwriter of his time.
As a playwright, novelist and short-story writer, Hecht always denigrated writing for the movies, but it is for such films as Scarface (1932) and Nothing Sacred (1937) as well The Front Page (1931), based on his play of the same name, for which he is best remembered.
He died on April 18, 1964, in New York City from thrombosis. He was 70 years old.- Writer
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Paul Auster was born in Newark, New Jersey on February 3rd 1947. His father was a landlord, who owned buildings with his brothers in Jersey City. The family was middle-class and the parents' marriage was not a happy one. Auster grew up in the Newark suburbs of South Orange and Maplewood. He read books enthusiastically and developed an interest for writing.
Auster attended high school in Maplewood, some twenty miles southwest of New York City. After his parents' divorce, during his senior year in high school, his mother moved, with his sister and him, to an apartment in the Weequahic section of Newark. Instead of attending his high-school graduation, Auster headed for Europe. He visited Italy, Spain, Paris and naturally James Joyce's Dublin. While he travelled he worked on a novel.
He returned to the United States in time to start at Columbia University in the fall. In early 1966 he began his relationship with Lydia Davis. Davis, who is now also a writer, was at that time attending Barnard College and was a good match for Auster's intellect. In 1967 Auster again left the US to attend Columbia's Junior Year Abroad in Paris. Auster became disillusioned with the dull existence within the programme and quit college. But he was still reinstated at Columbia when he returned to New York.
Auster's undergraduate years at Columbia coincided with a period of social unrest but he didn't participate actively in student politics. He supported himself with a variety of freelance jobs and wrote articles for university magazines. In June of 1969 Auster was granted a B.A. in English and comparative literature. The following year he received his M.A. from Columbia.
A high lottery number saved Auster from having to worry about the Vietnam draft and he took a job with the Census Bureau. During this period he also began work on the novels "In the Country of Last Things" and "Moon Palace", which he would not complete until many years later. In February 1971 Auster left once again for Paris. He supported himself there with a variety of odd jobs and minor literary tasks. He also worked on several film projects, one of them being in Mexico. In 1973 he moved with Davis to Provence where they became caretakers of a farmhouse.
After returning to the US in 1974, Auster has written poems, essays, novels, screenplays and translations. He directed his first motion picture in 1995. He lives in Brooklyn, New York City with his wife and two children.