Gaily, Gaily

With the vigor and gusto invariably associated with his personality and his works, Ben Hecht recreates in this volume the lusty Chicago of the early twentieth century, as seen from its underside by a cub reporter on a great metropolitan daily. He introduces the reader to a vast cast of eccentric characters-bums, criminals, prostitutes, politicians, and poets, not to mention the police. He conducts you to the scenes of the crimes. He invites you to the courtroom and the murderer’s solitary cell and to the gallows. He lets you sit around with him in the city room of a great Chicago newspaper, where he collected considerable material for that newspaper classic, The Front Page, which he wrote in collaboration with Charles MacArthur.

Some of these stories are bizarre. Most of them are bawdy. But they are all imbued with lusty vitality and with a kind of innocent wonder that life is really so much stranger than fiction. The author looks back on the whole era with the consistently-unchanged fresh eye of youth. He is less concerned with nostalgia than reporting the way it was.