SOURCE: “Ben Hecht,” in Sixteen Authors to One: Intimate Sketches of Leading American Story Tellers, Lewis Copeland Company, Inc., 1928, pp. 235–45.

In the following essay, Karsner favorably compares Hecht to other Chicago writers of the 1920s.

One can well imagine the lion tamer, who is as certain of life as the sexton is of death and equally as optimistic about the result, having decisive qualms for the safety of Ben Hecht, who was an acrobat in a midwestern circus in one of his early incarnations. Hecht was probably as incorrigible then as he is now. One can imagine him doing ten swift rotations with his left foot on the trapeze, and bringing down the tent with applause and admiration as he does a screw somersault landing upright on the glossy back of a pink-eyed white horse.

Ben Hecht has brought to his books many of the trapeze tricks he...