Ben Hecht
Hecht, 1949
Born	(1894-02-28)February 28, 1894 New York City, New York, US
Died	April 18, 1964(1964-04-18) (aged 70) New York City, New York, US
Spouse	Mary Armstrong (1916–1926) Rose Caylor (1926–1964)

Ben Hecht (/ˈhɛkt/ HEKT; 1894–1964) was an American screenwriter, director, producer, playwright, and novelist. Called "the Shakespeare of Hollywood", he received screen credits, alone or in collaboration, for the stories or screenplays of some 70 films and as a prolific storyteller, authored 35 books and created some of the most entertaining screenplays and plays in America. Film historian Richard Corliss called him "the" Hollywood screenwriter, someone who "personified Hollywood itself." The Dictionary of Literary Biography - American Screenwriters calls him "one of the most successful screenwriters in the history of motion pictures."

He was the first screenwriter to receive an Academy Award for Original Screenplay, for the movie Underworld (1927). The number of screenplays he wrote or worked on that are now considered classics is, according to Chicago's Newberry Library, "astounding," and included films such as, Scarface (1932), The Front Page, Twentieth Century (1934), Barbary Coast (1935), Nothing Sacred (1937), Some Like It Hot, Gone with the Wind, Gunga Din, Wuthering Heights, (all 1939), His Girl Friday (1940), Spellbound (1945), Notorious (1946), Monkey Business, A Farewell to Arms (1957), Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), and Casino Royale (released posthumously, in 1967). He also provided story ideas for such films as Stagecoach (1939). In 1940, he wrote, produced, and directed, Angels Over Broadway, which was nominated for Best Screenplay. In total, six of his movie screenplays were nominated for Academy Awards, with two winning.

He became an active Zionist shortly before the Holocaust began in Germany, and as a result wrote articles and plays about the plight of Europe's Jews, such as We Will Never Die in 1943 and A Flag is Born in 1946.^[1] Of his seventy to ninety screenplays, he wrote many anonymously to avoid the British boycott of his work in the late 1940s and early 1950s. The boycott was a response to Hecht's active support of paramilitary action against British forces in Palestine and sabotaging British property there (see below), during which time a supply ship to Palestine was named the S.S. Ben Hecht.

He could produce a screenplay in two weeks and, according to his autobiography, never spent more than eight weeks on a script. Yet he was still able to produce mostly rich, well-plotted, and witty screenplays. His scripts included virtually every movie genre: adventures, musicals, and impassioned romances. But ultimately, he was best known for two specific types of film: crime thrillers and screwball comedies. Despite his success, however, he disliked the effect that movies were having on the theater, American cultural standards, and on his own creativity.

Early years[link]

Hecht was born in New York City, the son of Russian–Jewish immigrants. Hecht’s father, Joseph Hecht, was a garment worker whose specialty was cutting cloth to patterns. He and his future wife, Sarah Swernofski, had immigrated to the Lower East Side from Minsk, Belarus, then part of the Russian Empire. The family language was Yiddish. The Hechts married on the Lower East Side in 1892 and Ben was born the next year.^{[2] :107}

The family moved to Racine, Wisconsin, where Ben attended high school. When Hecht was in his early teens he would spend the summers with an uncle in Chicago. On the road much of the time, his father did not have much effect on Hecht’s childhood, and his mother was busy managing the store outlet in downtown Racine. Film author Scott Siegal wrote, "He was considered a child prodigy at age 10, seemingly on his way to a career as a concert violinist, but two years later was performing as a circus acrobat.".^[3]

After graduating from high school in 1910, Hecht moved to Chicago, lived with relatives, and started a career in journalism. At sixteen, he ran away to live permanently in Chicago, and found work as a reporter, first for the Chicago Journal, and later with the Chicago Daily News.^[4] He was an excellent reporter who worked on several Chicago papers. After World War I, Hecht was sent to cover Berlin for the Chicago Daily News. There he wrote his first and most successful novel, Erik Dorn (1921). It was a sensational debut for Hecht as a serious writer.^[2]:108

The 1969 movie, Gaily, Gaily, directed by Norman Jewison and starring Beau Bridges as "Ben Harvey", was based on his life during his early years working as a reporter in Chicago, and was nominated for three Oscars. The story was taken from a portion of his autobiography, A Child of the Century.

Writing career[link]

Journalist[link]

Hecht in 1919

From 1918 to 1919 Hecht served as war correspondent in Berlin for the Chicago Daily News. According to Siegel, "Besides being a war reporter, he was noted for being a tough crime reporter while also becoming known in Chicago literary circles.".^[3]

In 1921, Hecht inaugurated a Daily News column called One Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago. While it lasted, the column was enormously influential. His editor, Henry Justin Smith, later said it represented a new concept in journalism:

"the idea that just under the edge of the news as commonly understood, the news often flatly unimaginatively told, lay life; that in this urban life there dwelt the stuff of literature, not hidden in remote places, either, but walking the downtown streets, peering from the windows of sky scrapers, sunning itself in parks and boulevards. He was going to be its interpreter. His was to be the lens throwing city life into new colors, his the microscope revealing its contortions in life and death."^[5]

While at the Chicago Daily News, Hecht famously broke the 1921 "Ragged Stranger Murder Case" story, about the murder of Carl Wanderer's wife, which led to the trial and execution of war hero Carl Wanderer. In Chicago, he also met and befriended Maxwell Bodenheim, an American poet and novelist, known as the King of Greenwich Village Bohemians, and with whom he became a lifelong friend.

After concluding One Thousand and One Afternoons, Hecht went on to produce novels, plays, screenplays, and memoirs, but none of these eclipsed his early success in finding the stuff of literature in city life. Recalling that period, Hecht wrote, "I haunted streets, whorehouses, police stations, courtrooms, theater stages, jails, saloons, slums, madhouses, fires, murders, riots, banquet halls and bookshops. I ran everywhere in the city like a fly buzzing in the works of a clock, tasted more than any fit belly could hold, learned not to sleep, and buried myself in a tick-tock of whirling hours that still echo in me."^[6]

Playwright[link]

He began writing plays beginning with a series of one-acts in 1914. His first full-length play was The Egotist, and was produced in New York in 1922. While living in Chicago, he met fellow reporter Charles MacArthur and together they moved to New York to collaborate on their play, The Front Page. It was widely acclaimed and had a successful run on Broadway of 281 performances, beginning August,1928. In 1931 it was turned into a successful film which was nominated for three Oscars.

Novelist and short-story writer[link]

Besides working as reporter in Chicago, "he also contributed to literary magazines including the Little Review. After World War I he was sent by the Chicago Daily News to Berlin to witness the revolutionary movements, which gave him the material for his first novel, Erik Dorn (1921). ... A daily column he wrote, 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, was later collected into a book, and brought Hecht fame." These works enhanced his reputation in the literary scene as a reporter, columnist, short story writer, and novelist. After leaving the News in 1923 he started his own newspaper The Chicago Literary Times.^[7]

According to biographer author Eddy Applegate, "Hecht read voraciously the works of Gautier, Adelaide, Mallarmé, and Verlaine, and developed a style that was extraordinary and imaginative. The use of metaphor, imagery, and vivid phrases made his writing distinct... again and again Hecht showed an uncanny ability to picture the strange jumble of events in strokes as vivid and touching as the brushmarks of a novelist."^[8]

"Ben Hecht was the enfant terrible of American letters in the first half of the twentieth century," wrote author Sanford Sternlicht. "If Hecht was consistently opposed to anything, it was to censorship of literature, art, and film by either the government or self-appointed guardians of public morality." He adds, "Even though he never attended college, Hecht became a successful novelist, playwright, journalist, and screenwriter. His star has sunk below the horizon now, but in his own lifetime Hecht became one of the most famous American literary and entertainment figures..."^[2]:107

Eventually Hecht became associated with the writers Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Maxwell Bodenheim, Carl Sandburg, and Pascal Covici. He knew Margaret Anderson and contributed to her Little Review, the magazine of the Chicago "literary renaissance," and to Smart Set.^[8]

A Child of the Century

In 1954 Hecht published his autobiography, A Child of the Century, which, according to literary critic Robert Schmuhl, "received such extensive critical acclaim that his literary reputation improved markedly during the last decade of his life... Hecht's vibrant and candid memoir of more than six hundred pages restored him to the stature of a serious and significant American writer."^[9] Novelist Saul Bellow commented about the book for the New York Times: "His manners are not always nice, but then nice manners do not always make interesting autobiographies, and this autobiography has the merit of being intensely interesting...If he is occasionally slick, he is also independent, forthright and original. Among the pussycats who write of social issues today he roars like an old-fashioned lion."^[10]

Ghostwriting Marilyn Monroe's biography

Besides working on novels and short stories (see book list), he has been credited with ghostwriting books, including Marilyn Monroe's autobiography My Story. "The reprint of Marilyn Monroe's memoir, My Story, in the year 2000, by Cooper Square Press, correctly credits Ben Hecht as an author, ending a period of almost 50 years in which Hecht's role was denied...Hecht himself publicly denied writing it until much later..."^[11]

According to Monroe biographer Sarah Churchwell, Monroe was "persuaded to capitalize on her newfound celebrity by beginning an autobiography. It was born out of a collaboration with journalist and screenwriter Ben Hecht, hired as a ghostwriter ..."^{[12] :77} Churchwell adds that the truths in her story were highly selective. "Hecht reported to his editor during the interviews that he was sometimes sure Marilyn was fabricating. He explained, 'When I say lying, I mean she isn’t telling the truth. I don’t think so much that she is trying to deceive me as that she is a fantasizer.'"^[12]:106

Screenwriter[link]

Caricature of Ben Hecht

Film historian Richard Corliss writes that "Ben Hecht was the Hollywood screenwriter...[and] it can be said without too much exaggeration that Hecht personifies Hollywood itself." Movie columnist Pauline Kael added that "between them, Hecht and Jules Furthman wrote most of the best American talkies."^[13]:5 His movie career can be defined by about twenty credited screenplays he wrote for Hawks, Hitchcock, Hathaway, Lubitsch, Wellman, Sternberg, and himself. He wrote many of those with his two regular collaborators, Charles MacArthur and Charles Lederer.

While living in New York in 1926, he received a telegram from screenwriter friend Herman J. Mankiewicz, who had recently moved to Los Angeles. "Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots", it read. "Don't let this get around." As a writer in need of money, he traveled to Hollywood as Mankiewicz suggested.^[3]

Working in Hollywood

He arrived in Los Angeles and began his career at the beginning of the sound era by writing the story for Josef von Sternberg's gangster movie, Underworld, in 1927. For that first screenplay and story he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in Hollywood's first Academy award ceremony.^[3] Soon afterward, he became the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood..."^[4] Hecht spent from two to twelve weeks in Hollywood each year, "during which he earned enough money (his record was $100,000 in one month, for two screenplays) to live on for the rest of the year in New York, where he did what he considered his serious writing," writes film historian Carol Easton.^[14]:173 Nonetheless, later in his career, "he was a writer who liked to think that his genius had been stifled by Hollywood and by its dreadful habit of giving him so much money."^[15]:267

Yet his income was as much a result of his skill as a writer as well as his early jobs with newspapers. As film historians Mast and Kawin wrote, "The newspaper reporters often seemed like gangsters who had accidentally ended up behind a typewriter rather than a tommy gun; they talked and acted as rough as the crooks their assignments forced them to cover...It is no accident that Ben Hecht, the greatest screenwriter of rapid-fire, flavorful tough talk as well as a major comic playwright, wrote gangster pictures, prison pictures, and newspaper pictures."^[16]

Hecht became one of Hollywood's most prolific screenwriters, able to write a full screenplay in two to eight weeks. According to Samuel Goldwyn biographer Carol Easton, in 1931, with his writing partner Charles MacArthur, he "knocked out The Unholy Garden in twelve hours. Hecht subsequently received a fan letter from producer Arthur Hornblow, Jr.:

'After reading your magnificent script, Mr. Goldwyn and I both wish to go on record with the statement that if The Unholy Garden isn't the finest motion picture Samuel Goldwyn has ever produced, the fault will be entirely ours. You have done your part superbly." It was produced exactly as written, and "became one of the biggest, yet funniest, bombs ever made by a studio."^[14]:174

Censorship, profit, and art

Despite his monetary success, however, Hecht always kept Hollywood at arms's length. According to film historian Gregory Black, "he did not consider his work for the movies serioius art; it was more a means of replenishing his bank account. When his work was finished, he retreated to New York."^[17]

At least part of the reason for this was due to the industry's system of censorship. Black writes, "as Mankiewicz, Selznick, and Hecht knew all too well, much of the blame for the failure of the movies to deal more frankly and honestly with life lay with a rigid censorship imposed on the industry . . . [and] on the content of films during its golden era of studio production." Because the costs of production and distribution were so high, the primary "goal of the studios was profit, not art. . .[and] fearful of losing any segment of their audiences, the studios either carefully avoided controversial topics or presented them in a way that evaded larger issues," thereby creating only 'harmless entertainment' ".^[17]

According to historian David Thomson, "to their own minds, Herman Mankiewicz and Ben Hecht both died morose and frustrated. Neither of them had written the great books they believed possible."^[15]:170

with Howard Hawks

In an interview with director Howard Hawks, with whom Hecht worked on many films, Scott Breivold elicited comments on the way they often worked:

Breivold. Could you explain how the day-to-day writing goes on a script?

Hawks. "Well, when Hecht and MacArthur and I used to work on a script, we’d sit in a room and work for two hours and then we’d play backgammon for an hour. Then we’d start again and one of us would be one character and one would be another character. We’d read our lines of dialogue and the whole idea was to try to stump the other people, to see if they could think of something crazier than you could."^[18]

with David O. Selznick

According to fim historian Virginia Wexman, "David Selznick had a flair for the dramatic, and no one knew that better than Ben Hecht. The two collaborated on some of Hollywood’s biggest hits – movies like Gone With the Wind and Notorious and Duel in the Sun – and often enough the making of those films was as rife with conflict as the films themselves..."^[19]:89

Nothing Sacred is probably the "most famous of all the Carole Lombard films next to My Man Godfrey," wrote movie historian James Harvey. And it impressed people at the time with its evident ambition ... "and Selznick determined to make the classiest of all screwball comedies, turned to Lombard as a necessity, but also to Ben Hecht, nearly the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood at the time, especially for comedy. ... it was also the first screwball comedy to lay apparent claim to larger satiric meanings, to make scathing observations about American life and society."^[20]:219

In an interview with Irene Selznick, ex-wife of producer David O. Selznick, she discussed the other leading screenwriters of that time:

"They all aspired to be Ben. The resourcefulness of his mind, his vitality were so enormous. His knowledge. His talent and ambition. He could tear through things, and he tore through life. They'd see this prodigious output of Ben's, and they'd think, 'Oh, hell, I'm a bum.' I think it must have been devastating. Ben did it to MacArthur, who died in time to save his reputation. And I'd hate to have been Herman [Mankiewicz], caught between Kaufman and Hecht."^[21]:160

with Ernst Lubitsch

According to James Harvey, Ernst Lubitsch felt uneasy in the world of playwright Noël Coward. "If Coward could write his play for three particular actors, he reasoned to an interviewer, why couldn’t it be rewritten for three others? It was at this point … that he turned to Ben Hecht...to work with him on the screenplay for Design for Living." It was the first and only Lubitsch-Hecht collaboration. Harvey adds, "Though Lubitsch must have been reassured by Hecht’s taking the job. No writer in Hollywood had better credentials in the tough, slangy, specifically American style that Lubitsch wanted to impart to the Coward play. And together they transformed it."^[20]:57

Styles of writing[link]

According to Siegel, "The talkie era put writers like Hecht at a premium because they could write dialogue in the quirky, idiosyncratic style of the common man. Hecht, in particular, was wonderful with slang, and he peppered his films with the argot of the streets. He also had a lively sense of humor and an uncanny ability to ground even the most outragious stories successfully with credible, fast-paced plots."^[3] "Ben Hecht," his friend Budd Schulberg wrote many years ago, "seemed the personification of the writer at the top of his game, the top of his world, not gnawing at doubting himself as great writers were said to do, but with every word and every gesture indicating the animal pleasure he took in writing well."^[6]

"Movies," Hecht was to recall, "were seldom written. In 1927 they were yelled into existence in conferences that kept going in saloons, brothels, and all-night poker games. Movie sets roared with arguments and organ music."^[22]

He was best known for two specific and contrasting types of film: crime thrillers and screwball comedies.^[3] Among crime thrillers, Hecht was responsible for such films as The Unholy Night (1929), the classic Scarface (1932), and Hitchcock's Notorious. Among his comedies, there were The Front Page, which led to many remakes, Noël Coward's Design for Living (1933), Twentieth Century, Nothing Sacred, and Howard Hawks' Monkey Business (1952).

Film historian Richard Corliss wrote, "it is his crisp, frenetic, sensational prose and dialogue style that elevates his work above that of the dozens of other reporters who streamed west to cover and exploit Hollywood's biggest 'story': the talkie revolution.^[13]:6

Personal life[link]

Married life[link]

He married Marie Armstrong in 1915, when he was 21 years of age, and had a daughter, Edwina, who became actress Edwina Armstrong. He was divorced a decade later by 1925, soon married Rose Caylor that same year, and remained married until Hecht's death in 1964. In 1943, they had a daughter Jenny Hecht, who also became an actress, but died of a drug overdose in March 1971, at age 27.

Civil rights activism[link]

According to Hecht historian Florice Whyte Kovan, he became active in promoting civil rights early in his career. "...in the early 1920s, Hecht organized campaigns against the Ku Klux Klan, whose lynchings of minorities, primarily blacks, terrorized the American South and North... Artists and writers joined the effort, blending civil rights into the arts and literary scene...

"Hecht wrote enough stories about black/white dynamics to form a small collection, including To Bert Williams, a richly symbolic obituary to the eminent vaudevillian, the thought provoking The Miracle...In the same period, circa May–June 1923, Hecht ... collaborated on a musical with Dave Payton (Peyton), jazz pianist and music critic for the black newspaper the Chicago Defender...He broke taboos by publishing a regular column, Black-belt Shadows, about Chicago and broader AfroAmerica by young William Moore -- with the then-daring editorial note: 'This column is conducted by a Negro journalist.' A factor in his willingness to work with blacks on occasion was his first playwriting experience: His collaborator was a young black student.

"Hecht film stories featuring black characters included Hallelujah, I'm a Bum, co-starring Edgar Conner as Al Jolson's sidekick in a politically savvy rhymed dialogue over Richard Rodgers music." (Jolson, a noted blackface performer and star of The Jazz Singer, was also active in promoting racial equality on the Broadway stage.)

"Hecht's most important race film historically was the Frank Capra message film The Negro Soldier, a feature length tribute shown to the armed forces and civilians during World War II."^[23]

Supporting allies during WWII[link]

Hecht was among a number of signers of a formal statement, issued in July, 1941, calling for the "utmost material assistance by our government to England, the Soviet Union and China." Among those who signed were former Nobel Prize winners in science, and others persons eminent in education, literature and the arts. It advocated "the protection of civil liberties and the rights of labor, ... the elimination of all forms of racial and religious discrimination from our public and private life ... [and] the world-wide defense of human liberty ... There can be no victory over Hitlerlism abroad if democracy is destroyed at home."

Later that year, he had his first musical collaboration with symphonic composer Ferde Grofe on their patriotic cantata Uncle Sam Stands Up.^[24]

Jewish activism[link]

Hecht claimed that he had never experienced anti-Semitism in his life, and claimed to have had little to do with Judaism, but nevertheless "was drawn back to the Lower East Side late in life and lived for a while on Henry Street, where he could absorb the energy and social consciousness of the ghetto," wrote author Sanford Sternlicht.^[2] In later years, before World War II began, Hecht "took on a ten year commitment to publicize the atrocities befalling his own religious minority, the Jews of Europe and the quest for survivors, to find a permanent home in the Middle East."^[23] In 1943, during the midst of the Holocaust, he predicted, in a widely published article in Reader's Digest magazine, "Of these 6,000,000 Jews [of Europe], almost a third have already been massacred by Germans, Romanians and Hungarians, and the most conservative of scorekeepers estimate that before the war ends at least another third will have been done to death."^[25]

Also in 1943, "out of frustration over American policy and outrage at Hollywood's fear of offending its European markets," he organized and wrote a pageant, We Will Never Die, which was produced by Billy Rose and Ernst Lubitsch and with the help of composer Kurt Weill and staging by Moss Hart. The pageant was performed at Madison Square Garden for two shows in front of 40,000 people in March, 1943. It then traveled nationwide, including a performance at the Hollywood Bowl. Hecht was disappointed nonetheless. As Weill noted afterwards, ""The pageant has accomplished nothing. Actually, all we have done is make a lot of Jews cry, which is not a unique accomplishment."^[26]:237

New York City opening of A Flag is Born at the Alvin Playhouse

A Flag is Born

Ben Hecht's activism began when he met Peter Bergson. Hecht wrote in his book Perfidy that he used to be a scriptwriter until his meeting with Bergson, when he accidentally bumped into history - i.e. the burning need to do anything possible to save the doomed Jews of Europe (paraphrase from Perfidy). After meeting Bergson, Hecht dedicated himself to working with his rescue group, and after the war ended he continued work for the establishment of the State of Israel. He wrote the screenplay for the Bergson Group’s production of A Flag is Born, which opened on September 5, 1946 at the Alvin Playhouse in New York City.

The play starred Marlon Brando and Paul Muni during its various productions. The proceeds from the play were used to purchase a ship that was renamed the S.S. Ben Hecht, which carried 900 refugees to Palestine in March, 1947. The British Navy captured the ship after it docked and sent 600 of its passengers to detention camps in Cyprus. The S.S. Ben Hecht later became the flagship of the Israeli Navy.^[27][28]

Six months after the establishment of Israel by the United Nations, Bergson and Hecht officially dissolved the organization which produced the fund-raising play, followed by a dinner in New York City where Menachem Begin appeared, saying, "I believe that my people, liberated and re-assembled in its country, will contribute its full share toward the progress of all mankind ... [and predicted] that all of Palestine eventually would be free and that peace and brotherhood would prevail among Arabs and Jews alike."^[29]

Thanks to his fund-raising, speeches, and jawboning, Sternlicht writes, "Ben Hecht did more to help Jewish refugees from the Holocaust and to ensure the survival of the nascent State of Israel than any other American Jew in the twentieth century". As much as anything, it was the abiding love of his Jewish parent and Rose Hecht that motivated the writer to become arguably "the most effective propagandist the Jewish state ever had." In 1964, at Hecht’s funeral service at Temple Rodeph Shalom in New York City, among the eulogists was Menachem Begin, the future Prime Minister of Israel.^[2]

Blacklisted in the UK

From 1948 to 1951, Hecht's films were blacklisted in the UK by a "concerted action by English film exhibitors to boycott" films written by him. This was a result of "his intemperate utterances on the Palestine problem," according to one source.^[30] In May 1947, for instance, ten months after Irgun, the Jewish insurgency organisation led by Begin, had responded to British arrests by blowing up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, British military headquarters at the time, killing 91 people, including Arabs and Jews as well as Britons, Hecht addressed Jewish militants thus: 'Every time you blow up a British arsenal, or wreck a British jail, or send a British railroad sky high, or rob a British bank, or let go with your guns at the British betrayers and invaders of your homeland, the Jews of America make a little holiday in their hearts.'^[31] His films were banned in the UK, and of the ones shown, his name was removed from the credits.^[4][30]

Notable screenplays[link]

Underworld (1927)

Underworld was the story of a petty hoodlum with political pull; it was based on a real Chicago gangster Hecht knew. "The film began the gangster film genre that became popular in the early 1930s."^[4] And along with Scarface, "were the alpha and omega of Hollywood's first gangster craze."^[13]:6 In it, he "manages both to congratulate journalism for its importance and to chastise it for its chicanery, by underlining the newspapers' complicity in promoting the underworld image."^[13]:10

"Like so many of his films, Underworld and Scarface are 'stories' that ace-reporter Hecht loved to cover, as much for the larger-than-life qualities of his headliners as for the enormity of their crimes. Love-hate ... fascination-revulsion ... expose'-glorification ... these are the polarities that make Hecht's best films deliciously ambiguous."^[13]:6 "Hecht's introduction, which is nothing if not moody and Sandburgian, describes 'A great city in the dead of night - streets lonely, moon-flooded - buildings empty as the cliff-dwellings of a forgotten age."^[13]:6

Hecht was noted for confronting producers and directors when he wasn't satisfied with the way they used his scripts. For this film, at one point he demanded that its director, Josef von Sternberg remove his name from the credits since Sternberg unilaterally changed one scene. Afterwards, however, he relented and took credit for the film's story, which went on to win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay - the first year the awards were presented.^[4]

The Front Page (1931)

After contributing to the original stories for a number of films, he worked without credit on the first film version of his original 1928 play The Front Page. It was produced by Howard Hughes and directed by Lewis Milestone in 1931. James Harvey writes, "it is Hecht and MacArthur’s Chicago ... that counts most deeply in the imagination of Hollywood. And their play, the first of the great newspaper comedies, did more to define the tone and style, the look and the sound of Hollywood comedy than any other work of its time."^[20]:86

Of the original play, theater producer and writer Jed Harris writes, "...here is a play which reflects miraculously the real as well as the literary personalities of the playwrights. Every line of it glows with a demoniacal humor, sordid, insolent and mischievous to the point of down right perversity, in which one instantly recognizes the heroic comic spirit of its authors... Both Hecht and MacArthur owe their literary origins to the newspapers of Chicago. Famous crime reporters, their talents were first cradled in the recounting of great exploits in arson, rape, murder, gang war and municipal politics. Out of a welter of jail breaks, hangings, floods and whore-house raidings, they have gathered the rich, savory characters who disport themselves on the stage to Times Square Theatre."^[32]

Scarface (1932)

After ushering in the beginning of the gangster film with Underworld, his next film became one of the best films of that genre. Scarface was directed by Howard Hawks, with "Hecht the wordsmith and Hawks the engineer..."^[13]:8, who became "one of the few directors with whom Hecht enjoyed working."^[4] It starred Paul Muni playing the role of an Al Capone-like gangster. "Scarface's all-but-suffocating vitality is a kind of cinematic version of tabloid prose at its best."^[13]:10

The story of how Scarface came to be written represents Hecht's writing style in those days. Film historian Max Wilk interviewed Leyland Hayward, an independent literary agent, who, in 1931, managed to convince Hecht that a young oil tycoon in Texas named Howard Hughes wanted him to write the screenplay to his first book. Hayward wrote about that period:

"So I went back to Hughes, and told him I’d been able to persuade Hecht to do his script; I told him Ben’s terms, - $1,000 per day - and Howard didn’t blink an eye. He nodded, and said 'Okay-it’s a deal. But you tell Hecht I want a real tough shoot-‘em up script that'll knock the audience out of its seats, okay?'^[22]

"So Ben went to work,” added Hayward. Hayward was to receive 10% of Hecht’s fees as his commission. "He was a hell of a fast writer – sometimes too fast. I didn’t even know how fast he could go ... At the end of the first day I went back to Ben’s house. There he was, typing away. ... I said 'Ben – please slow down.' Over the next few days, 'while watching the accumulated pages of Hecht’s script growing higher and higher, 'I couldn’t slow the guy down!' sighed Hayward, who only made his commission for each day Hecht worked.

"I came by his home the next day... 'I’ve got an idea. I’m going to finish this damn thing tomorrow,' Ben told me. 'Ben—for God’s sake!' I said. 'Can’t you slow down a little? Hughes isn’t interested in you setting some sort of a speed record for writing!'"

But it was as if young Hayward had set out to flag down an army tank. Nothing stopped Hecht. On the night of the ninth day, Hayward arrived with his daily payment from Hughes, to find Hecht lounging in a chair, enjoying a highball.

"Hecht waved at his stack of manuscript. 'Done,' he announced. 'Finished the damn thing.'

"Nine thousand dollars – for the screenplay of Scarface? sighed Hayward. ... Hughes was tickled with Ben’s script; he showed it to Howard Hawks. Hawks loved it, and then they picked up this wonderful young actor from New York, Paul Muni, to play the lead. The picture went out and cleaned up – made a bundle for Hughes … And if old Ben really outsmarted himself on that one ... he didn’t care. He was on to something else. Ben was always on to something else."^[22]

Twentieth Century (1934)

For his next film, Twentieth Century, he wrote the screenplay in collaboration with Charles MacArthur as an adaptation of their original play from 1932. It was directed by Howard Hawks, and starred John Barrymore and Carole Lombard. It's a comedy about a Broadway producer who was losing his leading lady to the seductive Hollywood film industry, and will do anything to win her back.

It's "a fast-paced, witty film that contains the rapid-fire dialogue for which Hecht became famous. It is one of the first, and finest, of the screwball comedies of the 1930s."^[4]

Viva Villa! (1934)

This was the story about Mexican rebel Pancho Villa, who takes to the hills after killing an overseer in revenge for his father's death. It was directed by Howard Hawks and starred Wallace Beery. Although the movie took liberties with the facts, it became a great success, and Hecht received an Academy award nomination for his screenplay adaptation.

In a letter from the film's producer, David O. Selznick, to studio head Louis B. Mayer, Selznick discussed the need for a script rewrite:^[33]:70

"I have arranged with Ben Hecht to do the final script of Viva Villa!... On the quality we are protected not merely by Hecht's ability but by the clause that the work must be to my satisfaction. It may seem like a short space of time for a man to do a complete new script, but Hecht is famous for his speed, and did the entire job on Scarface in eleven days."

Barbary Coast (1935)

Barbary Coast was also directed by Howard Hawks and starred Miriam Hopkins and Edward G. Robinson. The film takes place in late nineteenth century San Francisco with Hopkins playing the role of a dance-hall girl up against Robinson, who runs the town.

Nothing Sacred (1938)

Nothing Sacred became Hecht's first project after he and Charles MacArthur closed their failing film company which they started in 1934. The film was adapted from his play, Hazel Flagg, and starred Carole Lombard as a small-town girl diagnosed with radium poisoning. "A reporter makes her case a cause for his newspaper. The story "allowed Hecht to work with one of his favorite themes, hypocrisy (especially among journalists); he took the themes of lying, decadence, and immorality and made them into a sophisticated screwball comedy."^[4]

Gunga Din (1939)

Gunga Din was co-written with Charles MacArthur and became "one of Hollywood's greatest action-adventure films."^[4] The screenplay was based on the poem by Rudyard Kipling, directed by George Stevens and starred Cary Grant and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.. In 1999 the film was deemed "culturally significant" by the United States Library of Congress.

Wuthering Heights (1939)

After working without credit on Gone with the Wind in 1939, he co-wrote (with Charles MacArthur) an adaptation of Emily Bronte's novel Wuthering Heights. Although the screenplay was actually cut off at the story's half-way point as it was considered too long, it was nominated for an Academy Award.^[4]

It's a Wonderful World (1939)

Movie historian James Harvey notes that in some respects It’s a Wonderful World is an even more accomplished film –the comedy counterpart to the supremely assured and high-spirited work Van Dyke had done on San Francisco (1936). "Ben Hecht, another speed specialist, wrote the screenplay (from a story by Hecht and Herman Mankiewicz); it’s in his Front Page vein, with admixtures of It Happened One Night and Bringing Up Baby, as well as surprising adumbrations of the forties private-eye film.^[20]:335

Angels Over Broadway (1940)

Angels Over Broadway was the only movie he directed, produced, and wrote originally for film, other than Specter of the Rose (1946). It was considered "one of his most personal works."^[13]:21 It starred Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Rita Hayworth and was nominated for an Academy award. "The dialogue as well as the script's descriptive passages are chock full of brittle Hechtian similes that sparkle on the page but turn leaden when delivered. Hecht was an endlessly articulate raconteur. In his novels and memoirs, articulation dominates..."^[13]:19

In the script, he experimented with "reflections of life - as if a ghost were drifiting in the rain." These "reflections" of sidewalks, bridges, glass, and neon make the film a visual prototype of the forties film noir.^[13]:21

Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945) and Notorious (1946)

For Alfred Hitchcock he wrote a number of his best psycho-dramas and received his final Academy award nomination for Notorious. He also worked without credit on Hitchcock's next two films, The Paradine Case (1947) and Rope (1948). Spellbound, the first time Hitchcock worked with Hecht, is notable for being one of the first Hollywood movies to deal seriously with the subject of psychoanalysis.^[34]

Monkey Business (1952)

In 1947 he teamed up with Charles Lederer and cowrote three films: Her Husband's Affairs, Kiss of Death, and Ride the Pink Horse. In 1950 he cowrote The Thing without credit. They again teamed up to write the 1952 screwball comedy Monkey Business, which became Hecht's last true success as a screenwriter.^[4]

Uncredited films[link]

Among the more well-known films he helped write without credit were Gone with the Wind, The Shop Around the Corner, Foreign Correspondent, His Girl Friday (the second film version of his play The Front Page), The Sun Also Rises, Mutiny on the Bounty, Casino Royale (1967), and The Greatest Show on Earth.

Often, the only evidence of Hecht's involvement in a movie's screenplay has come from letters.

The following are snippets of letters discussing The Sun Also Rises, based on the novel by Ernest Hemingway:^[33]:444-445

Letter by David O. Selznick to Hecht, 12/19/1956: "My present feeling is that eighty per cent of the script is eighty percent right, and that twenty per cent of it is eighty per cent wrong. That's pretty damn good, considering the time we spent on it, even though it was twice as long as you normally spend. So let's really try to do a job that will be ... something that we can be proud of for many years to come ..."

Letter by Selznick to John Huston, 3/4/1957: "It is certainly not demeaning your talent to say that I don't think there is anybody alive who can come in on a job at the last minute and revise, without serious danger, work to which two old hands like Ben and myself have devoted many, many months of most careful work and devoted effort. . . it is also true that I have never seen Ben or anyone else bring to a job more thorough analysis, more willingness to rewrite, than he has."

The following letter discusses Portrait of Jennie (1948):^[33]:390-391

Letter by Selznick to Hecht, 11/24/1948: "Dear Ben: Very many thanks in advance for coming to the rescue again . . . the audience was enchanted ... and it set the mood beautifully for the picture . . . It needs the type of cinematic foreward journalese of which you are the only master I know . . . In any event, I shall be eagerly awaiting your redraft, which can take an entirely different form ... either actual or Hechtian creations..."

Gone with the Wind (1939)

For original screenplay writer Sidney Howard, film historian Joanne Yeck writes, "reducing the intricacies of Gone with the Wind's epic dimensions was a herculean task...and Howard's first submission was far too long, and would have required at least six hours of film; ... [producer] Selznick wanted Howard to remain on the set to make revisions...but Howard refused to leave New England [and] as a result, revisions were handled by a host of local writers, including Ben Hecht..."^[35] "Producer David O. Selznick replaced the film's director three weeks into filming and then had the script rewritten. He sought out director Victor Fleming, who, at the time, was directing The Wizard of Oz. Fleming was dissatisfied with the script, so Selznick brought in famed writer Ben Hecht to rewrite the entire screenplay within five days."^[36] Hecht was not credited, however, for his contribution, and Sidney Howard received the Academy Award for Best Screenplay.

In a letter from Selznick to film editor O'Shea [10/19/1939], Selznick discussed how the writing credits should appear, taking into consideration that Sidney Howard died a few months earlier after a farm-tractor accident at his home in Massachusetts:

"To Mr. O'Shea: Some time ago, it was my intention ot have, in addition to the Sidney Howard credit on Gone With the Wind, a list of contributing writers. I would rather now abandon this idea, first because while it is true that Sidney Howard did only a portion of the script ... [but] because I don't want to deprive Sidney Howard, and more particularly his widow, of any of the glory that may be attendant upon his last job."^[33]:216

In a letter [9/25/1939] from Selznick to Hecht, regarding writing introductory sequences and titles which were used to set the scene and condense the narrative throughout the movie, Selznick wrote,

"Dear Ben: There are only seven titles needed for Gone With the Wind and I am certain you could bat them out in a few minutes, especially since a few of them can be based on titles you wrote while you were here. Will you do these for me in accordance with your promise? ... Very anxious to get picture into laboratory at once and would appreciate it if you could tackle them immediately upon their receipt"^[33]:214

His Girl Friday (1940)

"His Girl Friday remains not just the fastest-talking romantic comedy ever made, but a very tricky inquiry into love's need for a chase (or a dream) and the sharpest pointer to uncertain gender roles."^[15]:221

The D.C. Examiner writes, "Director Howard Hawks’ 1940 classic “His Girl Friday” is not just one of the funniest screwball comedies ever made, it is also one of the finest film adaptations of a stage play. "Hawks took Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s Broadway hit “The Front Page,” the best play about newspapers ever written, and, by changing the gender of a major character, turned it into a romantic comedy. The new script was by Hecht (uncredited) and Charles Lederer."^[37]

Casino Royale (1967)

Hecht wrote the first screenplay for Ian Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale. Although the final screenplay and film was made into a comedy spoof, Hecht's version was written as a straight Bond adventure, states spy novelist Jeremy Duns, who recently discovered the original lost scripts. According to Duns, Hecht's version included elements hard to imagine in a film adaptation, adding that "these drafts are a master-class in thriller-writing, from the man who arguably perfected the form with Notorious."^[38] Hecht himself wrote that he has "never had more fun writing a movie," and felt the James Bond character was cinema’s first "gentleman superman" in a long time, as opposed to Hammett and Chandler’s "roughneck supermen." A few days before the final screenplay was announced to the press, Hecht died of a heart attack at his home.^[38] Duns compares Hecht's unpublished screenplay with the final rewritten film:

"All the pages in Hecht’s papers are gripping, but the material from April 1964 is phenomenal, and it’s easy to imagine it as the basis for a classic Bond adventure. Hecht’s treatment of the romance element is powerful and convincing, even with the throwaway ending, but there is also a distinctly adult feel to the story. It has all the excitement and glamour you would expect from a Bond film but is more suspenseful, and the violence is brutal rather than cartoonish."^[38]

Quotes[link]

Excerpts: on movies and writers[link]

from "Elegy for Wonderland", by Ben Hecht, Esquire Magazine, March 1959^[39]

"The factors that laid low so whooping and puissant an empire as the old Hollywood are many. I can think of a score, including the barbarian hordes of Television. But there is one that stands out for me in the post-mortem.... The factor had to do with the basis of movie-making: ‘Who shall be in charge of telling the story.’ ...

“The answer Hollywood figured out for this question was what doomed it. It figured out that writers were not to be in charge of creating stories. Instead, a curious tribe of inarticulate Pooh-Bahs called Supervisors and , later, Producers were summoned out of literary nowhere and given a thousand scepters. It was like switching the roles of teacher and pupil in the fifth grade. The result is now history. An industry based on writing had to collapse when the writer was given an errand-boy status. ... “Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away.” ...

“The writer is a definite human phenomenon. He is almost a type – as pugilists are a type. He may be a bad writer – an insipid one or a clumsy one – but there is a bug in him that keeps spinning yarns; and that bulges his brow a bit, narrows his jaws, weakens his eyes and gives him girl children instead of boys. Nobody but a writer can write. People who hang around writers for years – as producers did – who are much smarter and have much better taste, never learn to write. ...

“Most of my script-writing friends – I never had more than a handful—took eagerly to the bottle or the analyst’s couch, filled their extravagant ménages with threats of suicide, hurled themselves into hysterical amours. And some of them actually died in their forties and fifties. Among these were the witty Herman Mankiewicz and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the fine novelist. ...

“I have known a handful of producers who actually were equal or superior to the writers with whom they worked. These producers were a new kind of nonwriting writer hatched by the movies—as Australia produced wingless birds. They wrote without pencils or even words. Using a sort of mime-like talent, they could make up things like writers.

“When I come to put down their names, there weren’t many. David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, Walter Wanger, Irving Thalberg seem to exhaust the list…Ninety per cent of the producers I have known were not bright. They were as slow-witted and unprofessional toward making up a story as stockbrokers might be, or bus drivers. Even after twenty or thirty years of telling writers what and how to write, they were still as ignorant of writing as if they had never encountered the craft.

“Out of the seventy movies I’ve written some ten of them were not entirely waste product. These were Underworld, The Scoundrel, Wuthering Heights, Viva Villa, Scarface, Specter of the Rose, Actors and Sin, Roman Holiday, Spellbound, Nothing Sacred.”

Screenplays[link]

• "It's gonna be just like war!" an editor exults. "That's it! War! You put that in the lead. 'WAR - GANG WAR!'" Scarface (1932)
• "The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me. There now! Start to unravel from there." Design for Living (1933)
• "They're a symbol of the whole town, pretending to fight, love, weep and laugh all the time - and they're phonies, all of them. And I head the list...their phony hearts were dripping with the milk of human kindness." Nothing Sacred (1937)
• "Three years ago, the white hope of the theatre. Today, a mug. That's New York for you. Puts you on a Christmas tree, and then - the alley." Angels Over Broadway (1940)
• "Gibbons is a man full of pain and violence. On this night, there is a Witch's Sabbath in his heart. Storms are blowing his world to bits and great troubles are pounding him on a reef." Angels Over Broadway (1940)
• "The only place I felt at home was in your heart. You were the only light that didn't go out on me." Angels Over Broadway (1940)
• "Keep those lights burning, cover them with steel, build them in with guns, build a canopy of battleships and bombing planes around them and, hello, America, hang on to your lights, they're the only lights in the world." Foreign Correspondent (1940)
• "You're such a nice boy, what do you want to go off and get killed in the War for?" Miracle in the Rain (1956)

Books[link]

• "Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle. It gets him, however, more jobs. If his movie is bad it will attract only critical tut-tut for him. The producer, director and stars are the geniuses who get the hosannas when it's a hit. Theirs are also the heads that are mounted on spears when it's a flop." (from Let's Make the Hero a MacArthur)
• "In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel."
• "The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links."
• "People's sex habits are as well known in Hollywood as their political opinions, and much less criticized."
• When asked by his new wife's discomfited parents "Why didn't you tell us you were a Jew?", Hecht responded "I was afraid you would think I was bragging."
• "Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock."
• "There is nothing as dull as an intellectual ally after a certain age." (A Guide for the Bedevilled)
• "The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them." (Perfidy)
• "Like the actor, authority has faith in its false whiskers. But its deepest faith is in the human illusion. People will hang on to illusion as eagerly as life itself." (Perfidy)
• "Of the things men give each other the greatest is loyalty."
• "Movies are one of the bad habits that have corrupted our century. They have slipped into the American mind more misinformation in one evening than the Dark Ages could muster in a decade."
• "A movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it."
• "The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people."

• How My Egoism Died from A Child of the Century

Academy Award nominations[link]

• 19th Academy Awards Nominated Notorious
• 13th Academy Awards Nominated Angels Over Broadway
• 12th Academy Awards Nominated Wuthering Heights
• 8th Academy Awards Won The Scoundrel
• 7th Academy Awards Nominated Viva Villa!
• 1st Academy Awards - Won Underworld

Screenplays[link]

Books (partial list)[link]

• 1001 Afternoons in Chicago, McGee/Covici, (1922); University of Chicago Press, (2009) ISBN 978-0-226-32274-2
• Fantazius Mallare, a Mysterious Oath, 174 pp., Pascal Covici (1922)
• The Florentine Dagger: A Novel for Amateur Detectives w/ illustrations by Wallace Smith, 256 pp. Boni & Liveright (1923)
• Kingdom of Evil, 211pp., Pascal Covici (1924)
• Broken Necks { Containing More 1001 Afternoons }, 344pp., Pascal Covici (1926)
• Count Bruga, 319 pp., Boni & Liveright (1926)
• The Book of Miracles, 465 pp., Viking Press (1939)
• A Guide for the Bedevilled, 276 pages, Charles Scribner's Sons (1944), 216 pp. Milah Press Incorporated (September 1, 1999) ISBN 0-9646886-2-X
• The Collected Stories of Ben Hecht, 524 pp., Crown (1945)
• Perfidy (with critical supplements), 281 pp. (plus 29 pp.), Julian Messner (1962)
  • Perfidy 288 pp. Milah Press (1961), Inc. (April 1, 1997) ISBN 0-9646886-3-8
• Concerning a Woman of Sin, 222 pp., Mayflower (1964)
• Gaily, Gaily, Signet (1963) (November 1, 1969) ISBN
• A Child of the Century 672 pp. Plume (1954) (May 30, 1985) ISBN
• The Front Page, Samuel French Inc Plays (January 1, 1998) ISBN
• The Champion From Far Away (1931)
• Actor's Blood (1936)
• A Treasury Of Ben Hecht: Collected Stories And Other Writings (1959, anthology)
• Erik Dorn
• A Jew in Love
• I Hate Actors!
• 1001 Afternoons in New York
• The Sensualists
• Winkelberg
• Miracle in the Rain
• Letters From Bohemia
• Gargoyles
• The Egoist

Musical contributions[link]

• Uncle Sam Stands Up (1941) Hecht contributed the lyrics and poetry to this patriotic cantata for baritone solo, chorus, and orchestra by Ferde Grofe, written during the height of World War II
• We Will Never Die (1943) a pageant he composed with Kurt Weill, with staging by Moss Hart, written partly because of Hecht's consternation with American foreign policy in Europe concerning the Holocaust and Hollywood's fear of offending European (Axis) markets.

Footnotes[link]

References[link]

• Bleiler, Everett, The Checklist of Fantastic Literature (1948) Shasta Publishers
• Bluestone, George, From Novels Into Film (1968) Berkeley: University of California Press
• Fetherling, Doug, The Five Lives of Ben Hecht (1977) Lester & Orpen
• Halliwell, Leslie, Who's Who in the Movies (2006) Harper Collins
• MacAdams, William, "Ben Hecht: The Man Behind the Legend" (1990) Scribner; "Ben Hecht" (1995) Barricade
• Thomson, David, A Biographical Dictionary of Film (1995) Alfred A. Knopf
• Wollen, Peter, Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969) Indiana University Press

External links[link]

Biography portal

• Works by or about Ben Hecht at Internet Archive and Google Books (scanned books original editions)
• Works by Ben Hecht at Project Gutenberg (plain text and HTML)
• Ben Hecht at the Internet Movie Database
• Ben Hecht at the Internet Broadway Database
• Ben Hecht at the Internet Off-Broadway Database
• Ben Hecht: Biography with credits for many other works
• Summary: Perfidy and the Kastner Trial
• "Perfidy" Written by Ben Hecht: Reviewed by Michael Jacobs
• "Nirvana" by Ben Hecht
• United States Holocaust Memorial Museum - Ben Hecht
• Ben Hecht at Find a Grave
• Ben Hecht Papers at the Newberry Library

Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac by Tom Palumbo circa 1956
Born	Jean-Louis Kerouac[1] (1922-03-12)March 12, 1922 Lowell, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	October 21, 1969(1969-10-21) (aged 47) St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, Poet, Painter
Nationality	American
Genres	Beat Poets
Literary movement	Beat
Notable work(s)	On the Road The Dharma Bums Big Sur
Influences Henry Miller, Thomas Wolfe, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Marcel Proust, Jack London, James Joyce, Neal Cassady, Walt Whitman, Charlie Parker, Arthur Rimbaud, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, William S. Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Honoré de Balzac, John Fante, Herman Melville, Matsuo Basho, the Diamond Sutra, Lester Young
Influenced Thomas Pynchon, Tom Robbins, Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, Russell Banks, Joyce Johnson, Jim Morrison, Roy Harper, John Lennon, Bob Dylan, Morrissey, Tom Wolfe, Tom Waits, Jerry Garcia, Haruki Murakami, Ben Gibbard, Craig Finn, Will Clarke, Joe Cutler, Jim Dodge, Blake Schwarzenbach, Hunter S. Thompson, D.M. Court
Signature

Jean-Louis "Jack" Kerouac ( /ˈkɛruːæk/ or /ˈkɛrɵæk/; March 12, 1922 – October 21, 1969) was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation.^[2] Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic spirituality, jazz, promiscuity, Buddhism, drugs, poverty, and travel. His writings have inspired other writers, including Ken Kesey, Bob Dylan, Richard Brautigan, Curtis Meanor, Morrissey, Thomas Pynchon,^[3] Lester Bangs, Tom Robbins, Will Clarke, Ben Gibbard, Haruki Murakami, Jacquelyn Landgraf.^{[citation needed]} Kerouac became an underground celebrity and, with other beats, a progenitor of the hippie movement, although he remained antagonistic toward some of its politically radical elements.^[4] In 1969, at age 47, Kerouac died from internal bleeding due to long-standing abuse of alcohol. Since his death Kerouac's literary prestige has grown and several previously unseen works have been published. All of his books are in print today, among them: On the Road, Doctor Sax, The Dharma Bums, Mexico City Blues, The Subterraneans, Desolation Angels, Visions of Cody and Big Sur.

Biography[link]

Adolescence[link]

Jack Kerouac was born on 9 Lupine Road in the West Centralville section of Lowell Massachusetts, 2nd floor.

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, to French-Canadian parents, Léo-Alcide Kéroack and Gabrielle-Ange Lévesque, of St-Hubert-de-Rivière-du-Loup in the province of Quebec, Canada. There is some confusion surrounding his original name, partly due to variations on the spelling of Kerouac, and partly because of Kerouac's own promotion of his name as Jean-Louis Lebris de Kerouac. His reason for doing so seems to be linked to an old family legend that the Kerouacs had descended from Baron François Louis Alexandre Lebris de Kerouac. Kerouac's baptism certificate lists his name simply as Jean Louis Kirouac, and indeed Kirouac is the most common spelling of the name in Quebec.^[5] Kerouac claimed he descended from a Breton nobleman, granted land after the Battle of Quebec, whose sons all married Native Americans.^[6] Research has shown that Kerouac's roots were indeed in Brittany, and he was descended from a middle-class merchant colonist, Urbain-François Le Bihan, Sieur de Kervoac, whose sons married French Canadians.^[7][8] Kerouac's own father had been born to a family of potato farmers in the village of St-Hubert-de-Rivière-du-Loup. He also had various stories on the etymology of his surname, usually tracing it to Irish, Breton, or other Celtic roots. In one interview he claimed it was the name of a dead Celtic language and in another said it was from the Irish for "language of the water" and related to Kerwick.^[9] Kerouac, derived from Kervoach, is the name of one hamlet situated in Brittany in Lanmeur, near Morlaix.^[10]

His third of several homes growing up in the West Centralville section of Lowell, Jack Kerouac later referred to 34 Beaulieu Street as "sad Beaulieu". The Kirouack family was living there in 1926 when Jack's big brother Gerard died of rheumatic fever at the age of nine. Jack was four at the time, and would later say that Gerard followed him in life as a guardian angel. This is the Gerard of Kerouac's novel Visions of Gerard.

Despite the future elaborations, around the house during his childhood, Kerouac was referred to as Ti Jean or little John.^[5] Kerouac spoke the French-Canadian dialect called Joual until he learned English at age six, not speaking it confidently until his late teens.^[11] He was a serious child who was devoted to his mother, who played an important role in his life. She was a devout Catholic, instilling this into both her sons; this can be seen throughout his works.^[12] Kerouac would later say that his mother was the only woman he ever loved.^[13] When he was four, he was profoundly affected by the death of his nine-year-old brother, Gérard, from rheumatic fever, an event later described in his novel Visions of Gerard. His mother sought solace in her faith, while his father abandoned it wallowing in drinking, gambling and smoking.^[12] Some of Kerouac's poetry was written in French, and in letters written to friend Allen Ginsberg towards the end of his life, he expressed his desire to speak his parents' native tongue again. Recently, it was discovered that Kerouac first started writing On the Road in French, a language in which he also wrote two unpublished novels.^[14] The writings are in dialectal Quebec French.^[15]

On May 17, 1928, while six years old, Kerouac had his first Sacrament of Confession.^[16] For penance he was told to say a rosary, during the meditation of which he could hear God tell him that he had a good soul, that he would suffer in his life and die in pain and horror, but would in the end have salvation.^[16] This experience, along with his dying brother's vision of the Virgin Mary, and the nuns' fawning over the dying boy, convinced that he was a saint, incorporated with later found Buddhism and ongoing commitment to Christ, solidified into his worldview which informs his work.^[16]

There were few black people in Lowell,^[17] so the young Kerouac was not raised in an environment of racial hatred as many were at the time. Kerouac once recalled to Ted Berrigan, in an interview with the Paris Review, an incident from the 1940s, in which his mother and father were walking together in a Jewish neighborhood in the Lower East Side of New York, saying "And here comes a whole bunch of rabbis walking arm in arm... teedah- teedah - teedah... and they wouldn't part for this Christian man and his wife. So my father went POOM! and knocked a rabbi right in the gutter."^[18][19] His father, after the death of his child and apostasy, had treated a priest with similar contempt, angrily throwing him out of the house after an invitation by Gabrielle.^[12]

Kerouac's athletic skills as a running back in American football for Lowell High School earned him scholarship offers from Boston College, Notre Dame and Columbia University. He entered Columbia University after spending a year at Horace Mann School, where he earned the requisite grades to matriculate to Columbia. Kerouac cracked a tibia playing football during his freshman season, and he argued constantly with Coach Lou Little who kept him benched. While at Columbia, Kerouac wrote several sports articles for the student newspaper, the Columbia Daily Spectator and joined the fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta.^[20][21] He also studied at The New School.

Early adulthood[link]

When his football career at Columbia soured, Kerouac dropped out of the university. He continued to live for a period on New York City's Upper West Side with his girlfriend, Edie Parker. It was during this time that he met the people—now famous—with whom he would always be associated, the subjects injected into many of his novels: the so-called Beat Generation, including Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, John Clellon Holmes, Herbert Huncke and William S. Burroughs.

Kerouac joined the United States Merchant Marine in 1942, and in 1943 joined the United States Navy, but he served only eight days of active duty before arriving on the sick list. According to his medical report, Jack Kerouac said he “asked for an aspirin for his headaches and they diagnosed me Dementia Praecox and sent me here.” The medical examiner reported Jack Kerouac’s military adjustment was poor, quoting Kerouac: “I just can’t stand it; I like to be by myself”. Two days later he was honorably discharged on psychiatric grounds (he was of "indifferent character" with a diagnosis of "schizoid personality").^[22]

After serving briefly as a US Merchant Marine, Kerouac authored his first novel, The Sea is My Brother. Although written in 1942, the book was not published until 2011, some 42 years after Kerouac's death, and 70 years after the book was written. Although Kerouac described the work as being about "man’s simple revolt from society as it is, with the inequalities, frustration, and self-inflicted agonies", Kerouac reputedly viewed the work as a failure, reportedly calling it a "crock [of shit] as literature" and never actively sought publication of the book.^[23]

In 1944, Kerouac was arrested as a material witness in the murder of David Kammerer, who had been stalking Kerouac's friend Lucien Carr since Carr was a teenager in St. Louis. William Burroughs was a native of St. Louis, and it was through Carr that Kerouac came to know both Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. According to Carr, Kammerer's obsession with Carr turned aggressive, causing Carr to stab him to death in self-defense. After turning to Kerouac for help, together they disposed of evidence. Afterwards, as advised by Burroughs, they turned themselves in to the police. Kerouac's father, unwilling and unable, refused to pay his bail. Kerouac then agreed to marry Edie Parker if she'd pay the bail. Their marriage was annulled a year later, and Kerouac and Burroughs briefly collaborated on a novel about the Kammerer killing titled And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks. Though the book was not published during the lifetimes of either Kerouac or Burroughs, an excerpt eventually appeared in Word Virus: A William S. Burroughs Reader (and as noted below, the novel was finally published late 2008). Kerouac also later wrote about the killing in his novel Vanity of Duluoz.

Later, he lived with his parents in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens, after they also moved to New York. He wrote his first published novel, The Town and the City, and began the famous On the Road around 1949 while living there.^[25] His friends jokingly called him "The Wizard of Ozone Park," alluding to Thomas Edison's nickname, "the Wizard of Menlo Park" and to the film The Wizard of Oz.^[26]

Early career: 1950–1957[link]

Kerouac wrote constantly, carrying a notebook with him everywhere. Letters to friends and family members tended to be long and rambling, including great detail about his daily life and thoughts. Prior to becoming a writer, he tried a varied list of careers. He was a sports reporter for The Lowell Sun; a temporary worker in construction and food service; a United States Merchant Marine and he joined the United States Navy twice.

The Town and the City was published in 1950 under the name "John Kerouac" and, though it earned him a few respectable reviews, the book sold poorly. Heavily influenced by Kerouac's reading of Thomas Wolfe, it reflects on the generational epic formula and the contrasts of small town life versus the multi-dimensional, and larger, city. The book was heavily edited by Robert Giroux; some 400 pages were taken out.

For the next six years, Kerouac continued to write regularly. Building upon previous drafts tentatively titled "The Beat Generation" and "Gone on the Road," Kerouac completed what is now known as On the Road in April 1951, while living at 454 West 20th Street in Manhattan with his second wife, Joan Haverty.^[27] The book was largely autobiographical and describes Kerouac's road-trip adventures across the United States and Mexico with Neal Cassady in the late-40s, as well as his relationships with other Beat writers and friends. He completed the first version of the novel during a three-week extended session of spontaneous confessional prose. Kerouac wrote the final draft in 20 days, with Joan, his wife, supplying him bowls of pea soup and mugs of coffee to keep him going.^[28] Before beginning, Kerouac cut sheets of tracing paper^[29] into long strips, wide enough for a type-writer, and taped them together into a 120-foot (37 m) long roll he then fed into the machine. This allowed him to type continuously without the interruption of reloading pages. The resulting manuscript contained no chapter or paragraph breaks and was much more explicit than what would eventually be printed. Though "spontaneous," Kerouac had prepared long in advance before beginning to write.^[30] In fact, according to his Columbia professor and mentor Mark Van Doren, he had outlined much of the work in his journals over the several preceding years.

Though the work was completed quickly, Kerouac had a long and difficult time finding a publisher. Before On the Road was accepted by Viking Press, Kerouac got a job as a "railroad brakesman and fire lookout" traveling between the East and West coasts of America to collect money, so he could live with his mother. During this period of travel, he conspired what was to be "his life's work", "The Legend of Duluoz."^[31]

Publishers rejected On the Road because of its experimental writing style and its sympathetic tone towards minorities and marginalized social groups of post-War America. Many editors were also uncomfortable with the idea of publishing a book that contained what were, for the era, graphic descriptions of drug use and homosexual behavior—a move that could result in obscenity charges being filed, a fate that later befell Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Ginsberg's Howl.

According to Kerouac, On the Road "was really a story about two Catholic buddies roaming the country in search of God. And we found him. I found him in the sky, in Market Street San Francisco (those 2 visions), and Dean (Neal) had God sweating out of his forehead all the way. THERE IS NO OTHER WAY OUT FOR THE HOLY MAN: HE MUST SWEAT FOR GOD. And once he has found Him, the Godhood of God is forever Established and really must not be spoken about."^[12] According to his authorized biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley, On the Road has been misinterpreted as a tale of companions out looking for kicks, but the most important thing to comprend is that Kerouac was an American Catholic author - for example, virtually every page of his diary bore a sketch of a crucifix, a prayer, or an appeal to Christ to be forgiven.^[32]

In late 1951, Joan Haverty left and divorced Kerouac while pregnant. In February 1952, she gave birth to Kerouac's only child, Jan Kerouac, though he refused to acknowledge her as his own until a blood test confirmed it 9 years later.^[33] For the next several years Kerouac continued writing and traveling, taking extensive trips throughout the U.S. and Mexico and often fell into bouts of depression and heavy drug and alcohol use. During this period he finished drafts for what would become 10 more novels, including The Subterraneans, Doctor Sax, Tristessa, and Desolation Angels, which chronicle many of the events of these years.

In 1954, Kerouac discovered Dwight Goddard's A Buddhist Bible at the San Jose Library, which marked the beginning of his immersion into Buddhism. However, Kerouac had taken an interest in Eastern thought in 1946 when he read Heinrich Zimmer's Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization. Kerouac's stance on eastern texts then differed from when he took it up again in the early to mid-1950s. In 1955 Kerouac wrote a biography of Siddhartha Gautama, titled Wake Up, which was unpublished during his lifetime but eventually serialised in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, 1993–95. It was published by Viking in September 2008.^[34]

House in Orlando, Florida where Kerouac lived and wrote The Dharma Bums

Politically, Kerouac found enemies on both sides of the spectrum, the right disdaining his association with drugs and sexual libertinism and the left contemptuous of his anti-communism and Catholicism; characteristically he watched the 1954 Senate McCarthy hearings smoking cannabis and rooting for the anti-communist crusader, Senator Joe McCarthy.^[12] In Desolation Angels he wrote, "when I went to Columbia all they tried to teach us was Marx, as if I cared" (considering Marxism, like Freudianism, to be an illusory tangent).^[35]

In 1957, after being rejected by several other firms, On the Road was finally purchased by Viking Press, which demanded major revisions prior to publication.^[30] Many of the more sexually explicit passages were removed and, fearing libel suits, pseudonyms were used for the book's "characters". These revisions have often led to criticisms of the alleged spontaneity of Kerouac's style.^[29]

Later career: 1957–1969[link]

In July 1957, Kerouac moved to a small house at 1418½ Clouser Avenue in the College Park section of Orlando, Florida, to await the release of On the Road. Weeks later, a review appeared in The New York Times proclaiming Kerouac the voice of a new generation. Kerouac was hailed as a major American writer. His friendship with Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Gregory Corso, among others, became a notorious representation of the Beat Generation. The term “Beat Generation” was invented by Kerouac during a conversation held with fellow novelist Herbert Huncke. His fame came as an unmanageable surge that would ultimately be his undoing.

Kerouac's novel is often described as the defining work of the post-World War II Beat Generation and Kerouac came to be called "the king of the beat generation,"^[36] a term that he never felt comfortable with. He once observed, "I'm not a beatnik, I'm a Catholic", showing the reporter a painting of Pope Paul VI and saying, "You know who painted that? Me."^[37]

The success of On the Road brought Kerouac instant fame. His celebrity status brought publishers desiring unwanted manuscripts which were previously rejected before its publication.^[13] After nine months, he no longer felt safe in public. He was badly beaten by three men outside the San Remo Bar at 189 Bleecker Street in New York City one night. Neal Cassady, possibly as a result of his new notoriety as the central character of the book, was set up and arrested for selling marijuana.^[38][39]

In response, Kerouac chronicled parts of his own experience with Buddhism, as well as some of his adventures with Gary Snyder and other San Francisco-area poets, in The Dharma Bums, set in California and Washington and published in 1958. It was written in Orlando between November 26^[40] and December 7, 1957.^[41] To begin writing Dharma Bums, Kerouac typed onto a ten-foot length of teleprinter paper, to avoid interrupting his flow for paper changes, as he had done six years previously for On the Road.^[40]

Kerouac was demoralized by criticism of Dharma Bums from such respected figures in the American field of Buddhism as Zen teacher Ruth Fuller Sasaki and Alan Watts. He wrote to Snyder, referring to a meeting with D. T. Suzuki, that "even Suzuki was looking at me through slitted eyes as though I was a monstrous imposter." He passed up the opportunity to reunite with Snyder in California, and explained to Whalen, "I'd be ashamed to confront you and Gary now I've become so decadent and drunk and don't give a shit. I'm not a Buddhist any more."^[42]

Kerouac also wrote and narrated a "Beat" movie titled Pull My Daisy (1959), directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie. Originally to be called The Beat Generation, the title was changed at the last moment when MGM released a film by the same name in July 1959 which sensationalized "beatnik" culture.

The CBS Television series Route 66 (1960–64), featuring two untethered young men "on the road" in a Corvette seeking adventure and fueling their travels by apparently plentiful temporary jobs in the various U.S. locales framing the anthology styled stories, gave the impression of being a commercially sanitized misappropriation of Kerouac's "On The Road" story model. Even the leads, Buz and Todd, bore a resemblance to the dark, athletic Kerouac and the blonde Cassady/Moriarty, respectively. Kerouac felt he'd been conspicuously ripped off by Route 66 creator Stirling Silliphant and sought to sue him, CBS, the Screen Gems TV production company, and sponsor Chevrolet, but was somehow counseled against proceeding with what looked like a very potent cause of action.

John Antonelli's 1985 documentary Kerouac, the Movie begins and ends with footage of Kerouac reading from On the Road and Visions of Cody on The Tonight Show with Steve Allen in 1957. Kerouac appears intelligent but shy. "Are you nervous?" asks Steve Allen. "Naw," says Kerouac, sweating and fidgeting.

Kerouac developed something of a friendship with the scholar Alan Watts (renamed Dave Wayne in Kerouac's novel Big Sur, and Alex Aums in Desolation Angels). Kerouac moved to Northport, New York in March 1958, six months after releasing On the Road., to care for his aging mother Gabrielle and to hide from his new-found celebrity status.

In 1968, he appeared on the television show Firing Line produced and hosted by William F. Buckley. The visibly drunk Kerouac talked about the 1960s counterculture in what would be his last appearance on television.^[43]

Death[link]

On October 20, 1969, around 11 in the morning, Kerouac was sitting in his favorite chair, drinking whiskey and malt liquor, trying to scribble notes for a book about his father's print shop in Lowell, Mass. He suddenly felt sick to his stomach, which was nothing unusual, and headed for the bathroom. He began to throw up large amounts of blood, and yelled to his wife, "Stella, I'm bleeding." Eventually he was persuaded to go to the hospital and was taken by ambulance to St. Anthony's in St. Petersburg. Blood continued to pour from his mouth and he underwent several transfusions. That evening he underwent surgery in an attempt to tie off all the burst blood vessels, but his damaged liver prevented his blood from clotting. Kerouac died at 5:15 the following morning, October 21, 1969, never having regained consciousness after the operation.^{[citation needed]}

His death, at the age of 47, was determined to be due to an internal hemorrhage (bleeding esophageal varices) caused by cirrhosis, the result of a lifetime of heavy drinking, along with complications from an untreated hernia and a bar fight he had been involved in weeks prior to his demise.^[44][45][46] Kerouac is buried at Edson Cemetery in his hometown of Lowell and was honored posthumously with a Doctor of Letters degree from his hometown University of Massachusetts Lowell on June 2, 2007.

At the time of his death, he was living with his third wife, Stella Sampas Kerouac, and his mother, Gabrielle. Kerouac's mother inherited most of his estate and when she died in 1973, Stella inherited the rights to his works under a will purportedly signed by Gabrielle. Family members challenged the will and, on July 24, 2009, a judge in Pinellas County, Florida ruled that the will of Gabrielle Kerouac was fake, citing that Gabrielle Kerouac would not have been physically capable of providing her own signature on the date of the signing.^[47] However, such ruling has no effect on the copyright ownership of Jack's literary works, since in 2004 a Florida Probate Court ruled that "any claim against any assets or property which were inherited or received by any of the SAMPAS respondents through the Estate of Stella Sampas Kerouac, Deceased, is barred by reason of the provisions of the Florida Statute §733.710(1989)."^[48]

In 2007, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of On the Road's publishing, Viking issued two new editions: On the Road: The Original Scroll, and On the Road: 50th Anniversary Edition.^[49][50] By far the more significant is Scroll, a transcription of the original draft typed as one long paragraph on sheets of tracing paper which Kerouac taped together to form a 120-foot (37 m) scroll. The text is more sexually explicit than Viking allowed to be published in 1957, and also uses the real names of Kerouac's friends rather than the fictional names he later substituted. Indianapolis Colts owner Jim Irsay paid $2.43 million for the original scroll and allowed an exhibition tour that concluded at the end of 2009. The other new issue, 50th Anniversary Edition, is a reissue of the 40th anniversary issue under an updated title.

The Kerouac/Burroughs manuscript, And the Hippos Were Boiled in Their Tanks was published for the first time on November 1, 2008 by Grove Press.^[51] Previously, a fragment of the manuscript had been published in the Burroughs compendium, Word Virus.^[52]

Works[link]

Style[link]

Kerouac is generally considered to be the father of the Beat movement, although he actively disliked such labels. Kerouac's method was heavily influenced by the prolific explosion of Jazz, especially the Bebop genre established by Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, and others. Later, Kerouac would include ideas he developed from his Buddhist studies that began with Gary Snyder. He often referred to his style as spontaneous prose^{[citation needed]}, a literary technique akin to nothing. Although Kerouac’s prose was spontaneous and purportedly without edits, he primarily wrote autobiographical novels (or Roman à clef) based upon actual events from his life and the people with whom he interacted.

On the Road excerpt in the center of Jack Kerouac Alley

Many of his books exemplified this approach, including On the Road, Visions of Cody, Visions of Gerard, Big Sur, and The Subterraneans. The central features of this writing method were the ideas of breath (borrowed from Jazz and from Buddhist meditation breathing), improvising words over the inherent structures of mind and language, and not editing a single word (much of his work was edited by Donald Merriam Allen, a major figure in Beat Generation poetry who edited some of Ginsberg's work as well). Connected with his idea of breath was the elimination of the period, preferring to use a long, connecting dash instead. As such, the phrases occurring between dashes might resemble improvisational jazz licks. When spoken, the words might take on a certain kind of rhythm, though none of it pre-meditated.

Kerouac greatly admired Gary Snyder, many of whose ideas influenced him. The Dharma Bums contains accounts of a mountain climbing trip Kerouac took with Snyder, and also whole paragraphs from letters Snyder had written to Kerouac.^[53] While living with Snyder outside Mill Valley, California in 1956, Kerouac was working on a book centering around Snyder, which he was thinking of calling Visions of Gary.^[54] (This eventually became Dharma Bums, which Kerouac described as "mostly about [Snyder].")^[55] That summer, Kerouac took a job as a fire lookout on Desolation Peak in the North Cascades in Washington, after hearing Snyder's and Philip Whalen's accounts of their own lookout stints. Kerouac described the experience in his novel Desolation Angels.

He would go on for hours, often drunk, to friends and strangers about his method. Allen Ginsberg, initially unimpressed, would later be one of its great proponents, and indeed, he was apparently influenced by Kerouac's free flowing prose method of writing in the composition of his masterpiece "Howl". It was at about the time that Kerouac wrote The Subterraneans that he was approached by Ginsberg and others to formally explicate his style. Among the writings he set down specifically about his Spontaneous Prose method, the most concise would be Belief and Technique for Modern Prose, a list of 30 "essentials".

Some believed that at times Kerouac's writing technique did not produce lively or energetic prose. Truman Capote famously said about Kerouac's work, "That's not writing, it's typing".^[56] Despite such criticism, it should be kept in mind that what Kerouac said about writing and how he wrote are sometimes seen to be separate. According to Carolyn Cassady, and other people who knew him, he rewrote and rewrote. However, it should be taken into account that throughout most of the '50s Kerouac was constantly trying to have his work published, and consequently he often revised and re-arranged manuscripts in an often futile attempt to interest publishers, as is clearly documented in his collected letters (which are in themselves examples of his style^{[citation needed]}).

Although the body of Kerouac's work has been published in English, recent research has suggested that, aside from already known correspondence and letters written to friends and family, he also wrote unpublished works of fiction in French. A manuscript entitled Sur le Chemin (On the road) was discovered in 2008 by Québécois journalist Gabriel Anctil.^[57] The novella, completed in five days in Mexico during December 1952, is a telling example of Kerouac's attempts at writing in Joual,^[58] a dialect typical of the French-Canadian working class of the time. It can be summarized as a form of expression utilising both old patois and modern French mixed with modern English words (windshield being a modern English expression used casually by some French Canadians even today). Set in 1935, mostly on the American east coast, the short manuscript (50 pages) explores some of the recurring themes of Kerouac's literature by way of a narrative very close to, if not identical to, the spoken word. It tells the story of a group of men who agree to meet in New York, including a young 13-year-old Kerouac whom he refers to as Ti-Jean. Ti-Jean and his father Leo (Kerouac's father's real name) leave Boston by car, traveling to assist friends looking for a place to stay in the city. The story actually follows two cars and their passengers, one driving out of Denver and the other from Boston, until they eventually meet in a dingy bar in New York's Chinatown. In it, Kerouac's "French" is written in a form which has little regard for grammar or spelling, relying often on phonetics in order to render an authentic reproduction of his French-Canadian vernacular. The novel starts: Dans l'mois d'Octobre 1935, y'arriva une machine du West, de Denver, sur le chemin pour New York. Dans la machine était Dean Pomeray, un soûlon; Dean Pomeray Jr., son ti fils de 9 ans et Rolfe Glendiver, son step son, 24. C'était un vieille Model T Ford, toutes les trois avaient leux yeux attachez sur le chemin dans la nuit à travers la windshield.^[59] Even though this work shares the same title as one of his best known English novels, it is rather the original French version of a short text that would later become Old bull in the Bowery (also unpublished) once translated to English prose by Kerouac himself. Sur le Chemin is Kerouac's second known French manuscript, the first being La nuit est ma Femme written in early 1951 and completed a few days before he began the original English version of On the Road, as revealed by journalist Gabriel Anctil in the Montreal daily Le Devoir.^[60]

Influences[link]

Kerouac's early writing, particularly his first novel The Town and the City, was more conventional, and bore the strong influence of Thomas Wolfe. The technique Kerouac developed that later made him famous was heavily influenced by Jazz, especially Bebop, and later, Buddhism, as well as the famous "Joan Anderson letter" authored by Neal Cassady.^[61] The Diamond Sutra was the most important Buddhist text for Kerouac, and "probably one of the three or four most influential things he ever read".^[62] In 1955, he began an intensive study of this sutra, in a repeating weekly cycle, devoting one day to each of the six Pāramitās, and the seventh to the concluding passage on Samādhi. This was his sole reading on Desolation Peak, and he hoped by this means to condition his mind to emptiness, and possibly to have a vision.^[63]

However, often overlooked^[64] but perhaps his greatest literary influence may be that of James Joyce whose work he alludes to, by far, more than any other author.^[65] Kerouac had the highest esteem for Joyce, emulated and expanded on his techniques.^[65][66] Regarding On the Road, he wrote in a letter to Ginsberg, "I can tell you now as I look back on the flood of language. It is like Ulysses and should be treated with the same gravity."^[67] Indeed, Old Angel Midnight has been called "the closest thing to Finnegans Wake in American literature."^[66]

In his book "Light My Fire: My Life with The Doors", Ray Manzarek (keyboard player of The Doors) wrote "I suppose if Jack Kerouac had never written On the Road, The Doors would never have existed."

In 1974 the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was opened in his honor by Allen Ginsberg and Anne Waldman at Naropa University, a private Buddhist university in Boulder, Colorado. The school offers a BA in Writing and Literature, MFAs in Writing & Poetics and Creative Writing, and a summer writing program.^[68]

From 1978 to 1992, Joy Walsh published 28 issues of a magazine devoted to Kerouac, Moody Street Irregulars.

Kerouac's French Canadian origins inspired a 1987 National Film Board of Canada docudrama Jack Kerouac's Road - A Franco-American Odyssey, directed by Acadian filmmaker Herménégilde Chiasson.^[69]

In 1997, the house on Clouser Avenue where The Dharma Bums was written was purchased by a newly formed non-profit group, The Jack Kerouac Writers in Residence Project of Orlando, Inc. This group provides opportunities for aspiring writers to live in the same house in which Kerouac was inspired, with room and board covered for three months.

In 2007, Kerouac was awarded a posthumous honorary degree from the University of Massachusetts Lowell.^[70]

In 2009, the movie One Fast Move or I'm Gone - Kerouac's Big Sur was released. It chronicles the time in Kerouac's life that led to his novel Big Sur, with actors, writers, artists, and close friends giving their insight into the book. The movie also describes the people and places on which Kerouac based his characters and settings, including the cabin in Bixby Canyon. An album released to accompany the movie, "One Fast Move or I'm Gone", features Benjamin Gibbard (Death Cab for Cutie) and Jay Farrar (Son Volt) performing songs based on Kerouac's Big Sur.

In 2010, during the first weekend of October, the 25th anniversary of the literary festival "Lowell Celebrates Kerouac" was held in Kerouac's birthplace of Lowell, Massachusetts. It featured walking tours, literary seminars, and musical performances focused on Kerouac's work and that of the Beat Generation.

Independent filmmaker Michael Polish is directing Big Sur, based on the novel, with Jean-Marc Barr cast as Kerouac. Filming was done in and around Big Sur. The film is set for release in 2012.^[71][72]

Bibliography[link]

Discography[link]

Studio albums

• Poetry for the Beat Generation (with Steve Allen) (1959)
• Blues and Haikus (with Al Cohn and Zoot Sims) (1959)
• Readings by Jack Kerouac on the Beat Generation (1960)

Compilation albums

• The Jack Kerouac Collection (1990) [Box] (Audio CD Collection of 3 studio albums)
• Jack Kerouac Reads On the Road (1999)

References[link]

Further reading[link]

External links[link]

Franco-Americans portal

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Jack Kerouac

• Kerouac.net - An introduction to the life and work of Jack Kerouac, and the deep impact he had on our society and culture.
• Jack Kerouac at the Open Directory Project
• Jack Kerouac Papers at the Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Columbia University
• Ted Berrigan (Summer 1968). "Jack Kerouac, The Art of Fiction No. 41". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4260/the-art-of-fiction-no-41-jack-kerouac. 
• Chiasson, Herménégilde (1987). "Jack Kerouac's Road - A Franco-American Odyssey". Online documentary. National Film Board of Canada. http://www.nfb.ca/film/jack_kerouacs_road_francoamerican_odyssey/. Retrieved 25 October 2011. 
• Jack Kerouac at C-SPAN's American Writers: A Journey Through History

• Media related to Jack Kerouac at Wikimedia Commons

Kurt Weill in 1932.

Kurt Julian Weill (March 2, 1900^[1] – April 3, 1950^[1]) was a German-Jewish composer, active from the 1920s, and in his later years in the United States. He was a leading composer for the stage who was best known for his fruitful collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. With Brecht, he developed productions such as his most well known work The Threepenny Opera, a Marxist critique of capitalism, which included the ballad "Mack the Knife". Weill was a socialist^{[2][unreliable source?]} who held the ideal of writing music that served a socially useful purpose.^[3] He also wrote a number of works for the concert hall, as well as several Judaism-themed pieces.

Personal life[link]

Kurt Julian Weill was born on March 2, 1900,^[4] the third of four children to Albert Weill (1867–1950) and Emma Weill née Ackermann (1872–1955). He grew up in a religious Jewish family in the "Sandvorstadt", the Jewish quarter in Dessau, Germany, where his father was a cantor.^[1] At the age of twelve, Kurt Weill started taking piano lessons and made his first attempts at writing music; his earliest preserved composition was written in 1913 and is titled Mi Addir. Jewish Wedding Song.^[5]

In 1915, Weill started taking private lessons with Albert Bing, Kapellmeister at the "Herzogliches Hoftheater zu Dessau", who taught him piano, composition, music theory, and conducting. Weill performed publicly on piano for the first time in 1915, both as an accompanist and soloist. The following years he composed numerous Lieder to the lyrics of poets such as Joseph von Eichendorff, Arno Holz, and Anna Ritter, as well as a cycle of five songs titled Ofrahs Lieder to a German translation of a text by Yehuda Halevi.^[6]

Weill graduated with an Abitur from the Oberrealschule of Dessau in 1918, and enrolled at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik at the age of 18, where he studied composition with Engelbert Humperdinck,^[1] conducting with Rudolf Krasselt, and counterpoint with Friedrich E. Koch, and also attended philosophy lectures by Max Dessoir and Ernst Cassirer. The same year, he wrote his first string quartet (in B minor).^[7]

Early work and compositions[link]

Weill's family experienced financial hardship in the aftermath of World War I, and in July 1919, Weill abandoned his studies and returned to Dessau, where he was employed as a répétiteur at the Friedrich-Theater under the direction of the new Kapellmeister, Hans Knappertsbusch. During this time, he composed an orchestral suite in E-flat major, a symphonic poem of Rainer Maria Rilke's The Lay of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke as well as Schilflieder, a cycle of five songs to poems by Nikolaus Lenau. In December 1919, through the help of Humperdinck, Weill was appointed as Kapellmeister at the newly founded Stadttheater in Lüdenscheid, where he directed opera, operetta, and singspiel for five months, and also composed a cello sonata and Ninon de Lenclos, a now lost one-act operatic adaptation of a play by Ernst Hardt. From May to September 1920, Weill spent a couple of months in Leipzig, where his father had become the new director of a Jewish orphanage. Before he returned to Berlin, in September 1920, he composed Sulamith, a choral fantasy for soprano, female choir, and orchestra.

Studies with Busoni[link]

Back in Berlin, Weill had an interview with Ferruccio Busoni in December 1920. After examining some of Weill's compositions, Busoni accepted him as one of five master students in composition at the Preußische Akademie der Künste in Berlin.^[8] From January 1921 to December 1923, Weill studied music composition with him and also counterpoint with Philipp Jarnach in Berlin. During his first year he composed his first symphony, Sinfonie in einem Satz, as well as the lieder Die Bekehrte (Goethe) and two Rilkelieder for voice and piano. In order to support his family in Leipzig, he also worked as a pianist in a Bierkeller tavern. In spring of 1922, Weill joined the November Group's music faction. That year he composed a psalm, a divertimento for orchestra, and Sinfonia Sacra: Fantasia, Passacaglia, and Hymnus for Orchestra. On November 18, 1922, his children's pantomime Die Zaubernacht (The Magic Night) premiered at the Theater am Kurfürstendamm; it was the first public performance of any of Weill's works in the field of musical theatre.^[9]

Out of financial need, Weill taught music theory and composition to private students from 1923 to 1925. Among his students were Claudio Arrau, Maurice Abravanel, Henry (then known as Heinz) Jolles,^[10] and Nikos Skalkottas. Arrau, Abravenel, and Jolles, at least, would remain members of Weill's circle of friends thereafter,^[11] and Jolles's sole surviving composition predating the rise of the Nazi regime in 1933 is a fragment of a work for four pianos he and Weill wrote jointly.^[10] Weill's compositions during his last year of studies included Quodlibet, an orchestral suite version of Die Zaubernacht, Frauentanz, seven medieval poems for soprano, flute, viola, clarinet, French horn, and bassoon, and Recordare for choir and children's choir to words from the Book of Lamentations. Further premieres that year included a performance of his Divertimento for Orchestra by the Berlin Philharmonic under the direction of Heinz Unger on April 10, 1923, and the Hindemith-Amar Quartet's rendering of Weill's String Quartet, Op. 8, on June 24, 1923. In December 1923, Weill finished his studies with Busoni.^[12]

Success in the 1920s and early-1930s[link]

Weill in the 1920s.

In 1922 he joined the ‘Novembergruppe’, a group of leftist Berlin artists that included Hanns Eisler and Stefan Wolpe.^[13] In February 1924 the conductor Fritz Busch introduced him to the dramatist Georg Kaiser, with whom Weill would have a long-lasting creative partnership resulting in several one-act operas. At Kaiser's house in Grünheide, Weill also first met the actress and future wife Lotte Lenya in summer 1924.^[14] The couple got married twice: In 1926 and again in 1937 (following their divorce in 1933). Lenya took great care to support Weill's work, and after his death she took it upon herself to increase awareness of his music, forming the Kurt Weill Foundation.

From November 1924 to May 1929, Weill wrote hundreds of reviews for the influential and comprehensive radio program guide Der deutsche Rundfunk. Hans Siebert von Heister had already worked with Weill in the November Group, and offered Weill the job shortly after becoming editor-in-chief.^[15]

Although he had some success with his first mature non-stage works (such as the String Quartet, Op. 8 or the Concerto for Violin and Wind Orchestra, Op. 12), which were influenced by Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, Weill tended more and more to vocal music and musical theatre. His musical theatre work and his songs were extremely popular with the wider public in Germany at the end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s. Weill's music was admired by composers such as Alban Berg, Alexander von Zemlinsky, Darius Milhaud and Stravinsky, but it was also criticised by others: by Schoenberg, who later revised his opinion, and by Anton Webern.

His best-known work is The Threepenny Opera (1928), a reworking of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera written in collaboration with Bertolt Brecht. Engel directed the original production of The Threepenny Opera in 1928. It contains Weill's most famous song, "Mack the Knife" ("Die Moritat von Mackie Messer"). The stage success was filmed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst in two language versions: Die 3-Groschen-Oper and L'opéra de quat' sous. Weill and Brecht tried to stop the film adaptation through a well publicised lawsuit that Weill won and Brecht lost. Weill's working association with Brecht, although successful, came to an end over politics in 1930. Although Weill associated with socialism,^[16] after Brecht tried to push the play even further into a left wing direction, Weill commented, according to his wife Lenya, that he was unable to "set the communist party manifesto to music."^[17]

Paris, London and New York[link]

Weill fled Nazi Germany in March 1933.^[18] A prominent and popular Jewish composer, Weill was officially denounced for his socialist views and populist sympathies,^[19] and became a target of the Nazi authorities, who criticized and interfered with performances of his later stage works, such as Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny, 1930), Die Bürgschaft (1932), and Der Silbersee (1933). With no option but to leave Germany, he went first to Paris, where he worked once more with Brecht (after a project with Jean Cocteau failed) on the ballet The Seven Deadly Sins.

On April 13, 1933 his musical The Threepenny Opera was given its premiere on Broadway, but closed after 13 performances to mixed reviews.^[4] In 1934 he completed his Symphony No.2, his last purely orchestral work, conducted in Amsterdam and New York by Bruno Walter, and also the music for Jacques Deval's play, Marie Galante.^[18]

A production of his operetta Der Kuhhandel (A Kingdom for a Cow) took him to London in 1935, and later that year he went to the United States in connection with The Eternal Road,^[1] a "Biblical Drama" by Franz Werfel that had been commissioned by members of New York's Jewish community and was premiered in 1937 at the Manhattan Opera House, running for 153 performances.

Weill and his wife rented a house during the summer near Pine Brook Country Club in Nichols, Connecticut, the summer home of the Group Theatre, while working on Johnny Johnson (musical). Some of the other artists who summered there were; Elia Kazan, Harry Morgan, John Garfield, Lee J. Cobb, Will Geer, Clifford Odets, Howard Da Silva and Irwin Shaw ^[20][21][22]

He and his wife moved to New York City on September 10, 1935, living first at the St. Moritz Hotel before moving on to an apartment at 231 East 62nd Street between Third and Second Avenues.^[4] Weill believed that most of his work had been destroyed.^{[citation needed]} He seldom (and reluctantly) spoke or wrote German again, with rare exception^{[citation needed]} (for example, letters to his parents who had escaped to Palestine^{[citation needed]}).

Rather than continue to write in the same style that had characterized his European compositions, Weill made a study of American popular and stage music, and his American output, though held by some to be inferior, nonetheless contains individual songs and entire shows that not only became highly respected and admired, but have been seen as seminal works in the development of the American musical. Unique among Broadway composers of the time, Weill insisted on writing his own orchestrations (with some very few exceptions, such as the dance music in Street Scene).^[23] He worked with writers such as Maxwell Anderson and Ira Gershwin, and wrote a film score for Fritz Lang (You and Me, 1938). Weill himself strove to find a new way of creating an American opera that would be both commercially and artistically successful. The most interesting attempt in this direction is Street Scene, based on a play by Elmer Rice, with lyrics by Langston Hughes. For his work on Street Scene Weill was awarded the inaugural Tony Award for Best Original Score.^[24]

In the 1940s Weill lived in Downstate New York near the New Jersey border and made frequent trips both to New York City and to Hollywood for his work for theatre and film. Weill was active in political movements encouraging American entry into World War II, and after America joined the war in 1941, Weill enthusiastically collaborated in numerous artistic projects supporting the war effort both abroad and on the home front. He and Maxwell Anderson also joined the volunteer civil service by working as air raid wardens on High Tor Mountain between their homes in New City, New York and Haverstraw, New York in Rockland County. Weill became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1943.^[1]

Weill had ideals of writing music that served a socially useful purpose. In the US, he wrote Down in the Valley, an opera including the song of the same name and other American folk songs. He also wrote a number of songs in support of the American war effort, including the satirical "Schickelgruber" (with lyrics by Howard Dietz), "Buddy on the Nightshift" (with Oscar Hammerstein) and – with Brecht again as in his earlier career – the "Ballad of the Nazi Soldier's Wife" ("Und was bekam des Soldaten Weib?"). Intended for broadcast to Germany, the song chronicled the progress of the Nazi war machine through the gifts sent to the proud wife at home by her man at the front: furs from Oslo, a silk dress from Paris etc., until finally, from Russia, she receives her widow's veil.^[3]

Apart from "Mack the Knife" and "Pirate Jenny" from The Threepenny Opera, his most famous songs include "Alabama Song" (from Mahagonny), "Surabaya Johnny" (from Happy End), "Speak Low" (from One Touch of Venus), "Lost in the Stars" (from the musical of that name), "My Ship" (from Lady in the Dark), and "September Song" (from Knickerbocker Holiday).

Death[link]

Weill suffered a heart attack shortly after his 50th birthday and died on April 3, 1950 in New York City.^[18] He was buried in Mount Repose Cemetery in Haverstraw, New York. The text and music on his gravestone^[25] come from the song "A Bird of Passage" from Lost in the Stars, itself adapted from a quotation from the Venerable Bede:^[26]

This is the life of men on earth:

Out of darkness we come at birth

Into a lamplit room, and then –

Go forward into dark again.

(lyric: Maxwell Anderson)

An excerpt from Maxwell Anderson's eulogy for Weill read:

"I wish, of course, that he had been lucky enough to have had a little more time for his work. I could wish the times in which he lived had been less troubled. But these things were as they were – and Kurt managed to make thousands of beautiful things during the short and troubled time he had…"^[3]

Influence[link]

German stamp commemorating Weill.

Sixty years after his death, Weill's music continues to be performed both in popular and classical contexts. In Weill's lifetime, his work was most associated with the voice of his wife, Lotte Lenya, but shortly after his death "Mack the Knife" was established by Louis Armstrong and Bobby Darin as a jazz standard. His music has since been recorded by many performers, ranging from Nina Simone, The Doors, Judy Collins, , John Zorn, Dagmar Krause and PJ Harvey to New York's Metropolitan Opera and the Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Singers as varied as Teresa Stratas, Ute Lemper, Gisela May, Anne Sofie von Otter, Max Raabe, Dee Dee Bridgewater, and Marianne Faithfull have recorded entire albums of his music.

In 1985, Hal Willner produced Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill, a tribute album in which Weill's songs were interpreted by a variety of artists, including Todd Rundgren, Tom Waits, Lou Reed and Sting.^[27]

Amanda Palmer, singer/pianist of the 'Brechtian Punk Cabaret' duo The Dresden Dolls, has Kurt Weill's name on the front of her keyboard (a pun with the name of the instrument maker Kurzweil) as a tribute to the composer. In 1991, seminal Swiss Industrial music band The Young Gods released their album of Kurt Weill songs, The Young Gods Play Kurt Weill. In 2008, Weill's songs were performed by Canadian musicians (including Sarah Slean and Mary Margaret O'Hara) in a tribute concert as part of the first annual Canwest Cabaret Festival in Toronto. In 2009 Duke Special released an EP, entitled Huckleberry Finn, of five songs from an unfinished musical by Kurt Weill based on the novel by Mark Twain.

Compositions[link]

Stage works[link]

See List of works for the stage by Weill

Concert works[link]

Cantatas[link]

• 1920 : Sulamith, choral fantasy for soprano, female chorus and orchestra (lost)
• 1927 : Der neue Orpheus, cantata for soprano, solo violin and orchestra, op.16 (text: Yvan Goll)
• 1927 : Der Tod im Wald, cantata for bass and band (originally belonged to Das Berliner Requiem)
• 1928 : Das Berliner Requiem, cantata for tenor, baritone, male chorus (or three male voices) and wind orchestra (text: Bertolt Brecht)
• 1929 : Der Lindberghflug, cantata for tenor, baritone and bass soloists, chorus and orchestra (text: Bertolt Brecht, first version with music by Paul Hindemith and Weill, second version, also 1929, with music exclusively by Weill)
• 1940 : The Ballad of Magna Carta, cantata for tenor and bass soloists, chorus and orchestra (text: Maxwell Anderson)

Chamber music[link]

• 1918 : String Quartet in B minor (without opus number)
• 1923 : String Quartet op. 8
• 1919–1921 : Sonata for Cello and Piano

Piano music[link]

• 1917 : Intermezzo
• 1937 : Albumblatt for Erika (transcription of the pastorale from Der Weg der Verheissung)

Orchestral works[link]

• 1919 : Suite for orchestra
• 1919 : Die Weise von Liebe and Tod, symphonic poem for orchestra after Rainer Maria Rilke (lost)
• 1921 : Symphony No.1 in one movement for orchestra
• 1922 : Divertimento for orchestra, op.5 (unfinished, reconstructed by David Drew)
• 1922 : Sinfonia Sacra, Fantasia, Passacaglia and Hymnus for orchestra, op. 6 (unfinished)
• 1923 : Quodlibet, suite for orchestra from the pantomime Zaubernacht, op. 9
• 1925 : Concerto for violin and wind orchestra, op. 12
• 1927 : Bastille Musik, suite for wind orchestra (arranged by David Drew, 1975) from the stage music to Gustav III, by August Strindberg
• 1929 : Kleine Dreigroschenmusik, suite from Die Dreigroschenoper for wind orchestra, piano and percussion, (premiere conducted by Otto Klemperer)
• 1934 : Suite panaméenne for chamber orchestra, (from Marie Galante)
• 1934 : Symphony No. 2 in three movements for orchestra, (premiere by Royal Concertgebouw orchestra under Bruno Walter)
• 1939 " mother courage and her childen" with Bertolt Brecht
• 1947 : Hatikvah, arrangement of the Israeli National Anthem for orchestra

[edit] Lieder, Lieder cycles, songs and chansons

• 1919 : Die stille Stadt, for voice and piano, text: Richard Dehmel
• 1923 : Frauentanz op.10, Lieder cycle for soprano, flute, viola, clarinet, horn and bassoon (after medieval poems)
• 1923 : Stundenbuch, Lieder cycle for baritone and orchestra, text: Rainer Maria Rilke
• 1925 : Klopslied, for high voice, two piccolos and bassoon ('Ick sitze da un' esse Klops'/Berliner Lied)
• 1927 : Vom Tod im Wald (Death in the Forest), Op. 23, ballad for bass solo and ten wind instruments, text: Bertolt Brecht
• 1928 : Berlin im Licht-Song, slow-fox, text: Kurt Weill; composed for the exhibition Berlin im Licht, first performance in Wittenbergplatz (with orchestra) on October 13, and on October 16 in the Kroll Opera (with voice and piano)
• 1928 : Die Muschel von Margate: Petroleum Song, slow-fox, text: Felix Gasbarra for the play by Leo Lania, Konjunktur
• 1928 : Zu Potsdam unter den Eichen (In Potsdam under the Oak Trees), song for voice and piano, alternatively male chorus a cappella, text: Bertolt Brecht
• 1928 : Das Lied von den braunen Inseln, text: Lion Feuchtwanger, from the play by same author, Petroleum Inseln
• 1933 : Der Abschiedsbrief, text: Erich Kästner, intended for Marlene Dietrich
• 1933 : La complainte de Fantômas, text: Robert Desnos; for a broadcast of Fantômas in November 1933 (the music was lost, and later reconstructed by Jacques Loussier for Catherine Sauvage)
• 1933 : Es regnet, text: Jean Cocteau (direct into German)
• 1934 : Je ne t'aime pas, text: Maurice Magre for the soprano Lys Gauty
• 1934 : J'attends un navire, text: Jacques Deval, from Marie Galante ; as an independent song for Lys Gauty; used for the Hymne der Resistance during the Second World War
• 1934 : Youkali (originally the Tango habanera, instrumental movement in Marie Galante), Text: Roger Fernay
• 1934 : Complainte de la Seine, text: Maurice Magre
• 1939 : Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, song for voice and piano, text: Robert Frost (unfinished)
• 1942 : Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory, patriotic song arrangements for narrator, male chorus, and orchestra, of the Battle Hymn of the Republic (text: Julia Ward Howe), The Star-Spangled Banner (text: Francis Scott Key), America (text: Samuel Francis Smith) and Beat! Beat! Drums! (text: Walt Whitman)
• 1942–44 : Propaganda Songs, for voice and piano; written for the Lunch Hours Follies performed for the workers of a shipbuilding workshop in New York, then broadcast:
  • 1942 : Buddy on the Nightshift, text: Oscar Hammerstein
  • 1942 : Schickelgruber, text: Howard Dietz
• 1942 : Und was bekam des Soldaten Weib? (And what was sent to the soldier's wife?), ballad for voice and piano, text: Bertolt Brecht
• 1942–47 : Three Walt Whitman Songs, later Four Walt Whitman Songs for voice and piano (or orchestra), text: Walt Whitman
• 1944 : Wie lange noch?, text: Walter Mehring; premiere: Lotte Lenya