num_pages: 114
description: Chicago, Chicago, Chicago! Just as its cachet beckons tourists, play-goers and readers from around the world today, Chicago of the 1920s beckoned the world's most daring architects and the world's most optimistic modern artists. Ben Hecht, now remembered for his career as Hollywood's highest paid writer, was on the scene in his journalistic youth, taking the pulse of the Chicago Loop (the downtown area next to Lake Michigan) and reporting the city-building, the architects' perspectives and the offerings of high culture with passion, wit and intelligence. In our first thematic anthology, Selling the Celluloid Serpent, we brought out Hecht's zany and provocative Chicago stories about how the silent movies were made. In this second volume, we again present a Hecht transcending his stereotypical reputation for tough crime dramas. Here he grapples with the aesthetic arguments of the fine arts scene, gossips about artists anecdotally and marvels at Chicago's built environment of the 1920s. Of the soaring skyline and downtown cacophony of jazz-age Chicago he shouts, "Art, beauty, grace--- idiot ocular comforts to cry for when one has a front seat in chaos. Here, coming to life before one's astounded eyes, is beauty in a new cloak!"
language: English
title: Art & Architecture on 1001 Afternoons in Chicago: Essays and Tall Tales of Artists and the Cityscape of the 1920s
titlecomplete: Art & Architecture on 1001 Afternoons in Chicago: Essays and Tall Tales of Artists and the Cityscape of the 1920s (Rediscovering Ben Hecht series)
publisher: Snickersnee Press