1001 Afternoons in New York

New York: The Viking Press. Very Good+. 1941. First Edition. Hardcover. (no dust jacket) [a good sound copy with only light shelfwear, gilt spine lettering & decoration somewhat rubbed but still readable]. (pen and ink drawings) After a decade or so of working primarily as a very well-paid Hollywood screenwriter, Hecht was lured back to churning out a regular newspaper column by the progressive New York daily PM, which began publishing in June 1940, his deal being that he was given the freedom to write on any topic he pleased. This collection of 87 such pieces from his first year or so of the enterprise therefore casts a broad net, featuring everything from anti-Hitler/Nazi polemics to anecdotal snapshots of Gene Fowler, Harpo Marx, and others of his Hollywood set (although from a New York perspective, i.e. they were visiting from "the Coast"). Hecht's own description of his subject (from his introduction) was: "the addle-headed city of New York -- the teeming and invincible citadel of ball games, slum dramas, night life, soap-box revolutions, and all the other jackstraw items of democracy." The volume was consciously titled to hark back to Hecht's best-selling book from the early 1920s, "A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago," published when his fame was much more localized. The choice of German emigré George Grosz (then resident in New York, having fled the Nazis in 1933) to provide the illustrations seems to have been made for the book itself, as I've seen no evidence that Grosz's work ever appeared in PM. . (Inventory #: 28842)