Art & Architecture on 1001 Afternoons in Chicago
Essays and tall tales of artists and the cityscape of the 1920s
ISBN 0966770919
Stories by Ben Hecht, taken from his Chicago literary journalism in the Chicago Daily News
Research, selection, commentary and book design by Florice Whyte Kovan; Cover image from hand-made paper by Sheila Crider
If you are Hecht fan or researcher, you will find some things you did not know about him in these stories and commentary: His relationship with Da Da artists Georg Grosz and Von Baader; with Stanislaw Szukalski, and with artist friends who succeeded as art directors in Hollywood and on Broadway, e.g., Herman Rosse and Herman Sachs. Hecht could be tongue-in-cheek or wax serious about his subject and dip into his vast reading. The Frank Lloyd Wright roman a' clef and Georg George Grosz piece are my personal favorites. Szukalski, Rosse and Grosz have two-page picture spreads and Szukalski the title page image.
The editor/designer speaks: "I created and published this book after reading the forgotten newspaper columns Ben Hecht wrote when he was a journalist in Chicago -- over 400 of them. The stories bring to life Chicago's architecture and arts scene of the early 1920s. These stories are from Hecht's renowned 1001 Afternoons in Chicago column in the Chicago Daily News and his Chicago Literary Times; but were not anthologized in the oft reprinted 1922 Covici book of just 80 stories.
My research was supported by the Library of Congress, which generously gave me a study desk, enabling my additional work at contextualizing the stories with other readings. I obtained reference images about the art and artists Hecht wrote about from the great art libraries coast to coast and from his own arts newspaper.
As in my previous book of Hecht's stories about the silent film business in Chicago, I sometimes varied the column heights to evoke the cityscape of Chicago. I chose an oblong format to express not just the height of Chicago's skyscrapers, but their expanse across the Chicago lakefront. Publishing in 2002 I used black and white reference pictures to keep the focus on Hecht's text. Each story contains further commentary within the body of the book or in my end notes. I sometimes relate the stories to the subsequent film work of these artists or to Hecht's association with them himself, as when he watched what would become the Temple Building day by day under construction. The book is indexed to names and subject matter.
This is Volume II of my two-volume series, Rediscovering Ben Hecht. The book is in the original shrink wrap. Thank you for considering it! Ask about the 1st Edition artist book which may not be listed currently and I will list it for an eBay sale on request.
The book may be found at the Getty, Newberry, NGA, MoMA libraries, the Da Da collection at the University of Iowa and other arts libraries in the USA and Europe.
About me: Florice Whyte Kovan was the keynote speaker at University of Chicago Doc Films series of Hecht films, the first to honor a writer rather than a director. She was a speaker at the Newberry Library. As an adviser to Moonlights and Magnolias, the Broadway production about Hecht's madcap stint in the writing of Gone with the Wind, she consulted on the Hecht wardrobe and character. She was a research consultant to the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Hecht's musical collaborations. Kovan wrote and published The Ben Hecht Story & News monthly and the Bibliocityscape, a vertical bibliography of his 425 Chicago stories. A resident of Washington DC, she became interested in Hecht because of the connection between his boyhood home and her own childhood home in Racine, Wisconsin.
Florice Whyte Kovan
aka floriAnnette at Etsy
Check my Chicago listings for a First Edition of this book I did in various colors and textures of paper, and Vol I in my Rediscovering Ben Hecht series is Selling the Celluloid Serpent, about the silent film industry in Chicago.