Ben Hecht’s “A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago”

In 1921,the legendary Ben Hecht began writing a daily column for the Chicago Daily News. This column named “A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago” featured fictive sketches of Chicago’s bustling urban landscape at that time. A year later, 64 of these vignettes were compiled and published as a book with the same title. Beginning Tuesday morning, this coming June 3, I will be teaching a class in the Oakton Community College Emeritus Program about Hecht and this amazing book, with its incredible stories depicting ordinary Chicagoans in ordinary situations, but in Hecht’s most extraordinary literary style. In total, there will be four classes sessions, on Tuesday mornings at the Skokie campus from 10: am until 11:30 am, concluding on June 24. For more information go to http://www.oakton.edu/conted or feel free to comment to me on this blog.

Morris B. Sachs: A Chicago Original

My piece, “Morris B. Sachs: A Chicago Original,” is the lead article in the Chicago Jewish History Winter Journal, a publication of the Chicago Jewish Historical Society, an organization in which my history teacher at Mather High School in Chicago, Muriel Robin, was the founding president. Check it out at http://www.chicagojewishhistory.org.