Child of the Century

Ben Hecht’s critically acclaimed autobiographical memoir, first published in 1954, offers incomparably pungent evocations of Chicago in the 1910s and 1920s, Hollywood in the 1930s, and New York during the Second World War and after. “His manners are not always nice, but then nice manners do not always make interesting autobiographies, and this autobiography has the merit of being intensely interes...