Over a career spanning nearly half a century, Ben Hecht wrote highly individual works which earned him a place in both popular culture and American literature. An outspoken, abrasive personality, he was often at the center of self-created controversies in which he was pitted against middle-class values at odds to his own on topics ranging from class relations to international politics, sexual mores to anti-Semitism. By his own words a "child of the century," he was preternaturally aware of playing center-stage roles in many of the great dramatic events of early- and mid-twentieth-century history. In the decades since his death, his literary reputation, which declined steadily under the generalized impression that he sold out to Hollywood, has continued to languish, although for a time in the early 1920s he was thought one of America's most prodigious talents and indeed exerted strong influences upon important later writers such as...