SOURCE: “Tom Sawyer Grows Up: Ben Hecht as a Writer,” in Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. IX, No. 4, Spring, 1976, pp. 908–15.

In the following essay, Felheim finds evidence that Hecht was influenced by Mark Twain's Tom Sawyer.

I

Writing a review of A Treasury of Ben Hecht (1959) in The New Republic for September 28 of that year, John Wain correctly identified the aging Hecht as “a romantic.” But he mistook the source. “Not just any kind of romantic, but a Wildean romantic, a man of the nineties.” Further, Wain assumed, with insight, that Humpty Dumpty, Hecht's successful 1924 novel, had been a somewhat distorted but definite redoing of The Picture of Dorian Gray. It is easy to agree with Wain's judgment. But I would prefer another model; my candidate: Tom Sawyer.

Like Tom, Hecht and his major heroes, Erik Dorn (1921) and Kent Savaron, the central character of Humpty Dumpty, have excessively...