Humpty Dumpty

New York: Boni and Liveright, 1924. First Edition. Hardcover. Very good-. Octavo, 383pp. A crisp, clean copy, about very good, in the publisher's yellow cloth. Spine somewhat darkened, with mild soiling to the cloth. Contents clean. Lacking the dust jacket. This copy SIGNED and warmly INSCRIBED by Hecht in a contemporary hand on the front free endpaper to his editor at the Chicago Daily News: "To my most consistent friend, Henry J. Smith. Ben Hecht." Hecht, a prolific novelist and often uncredited screenwriter, got his start as a reporter for the Chicago Daily News, after a short while being sent off to Berlin to cover the First World War for the paper. While in Berlin and dilligently reporting on the conflict, he also began to cover crime, taking that skill home with him to Chicago. Hecht famously broke the 1921 murder case, known as the "Ragged Stranger" murder, which ended with the conviction of WW1 hero Carl Wanderer for the murder of his wife and a yet unidentified stranger for partly unknown motivations. Smith, the subject of the inscription, reflected on Hecht's importance decades after their initial collaboration: "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." (Kerrane et al. "The Art of Fact: A Historical Anthology of Literary Journalism," Simon and Schuster (1998)). A significant early association copy of this early book by the prolific writer.