Hecht was born on February 28, 1894, in New York City, the son of Joseph and Sarah Hecht. When he was six years old, his family moved to Racine, Wisconsin, where he resided until moving to Chicago in 1910.

In Chicago Hecht began working for the Chicago Journal and eventually become a successful journalist. His interests were not limited to reporting; he also wrote a newspaper column, poetry, and plays. By the early 1920s, he was also a celebrated novelist.

Hecht's reputation as a playwright was established in the 1920s. Though he had a play produced as early as 1917, his first Broadway show was The Egotist (1922).

His most popular plays were written in collaboration with Charles MacArthur (see below), a fellow Chicagoan with a newspaper background. Their most successful collaboration was The Front Page (1928), which drew on both their newspaper backgrounds and established a stereotype of reporters repeated on...