Hecht was born on February 28, 1894, in New York City, the son of Joseph and Sarah Hecht. When he was six years old, his family moved to Racine, Wisconsin, where he resided until moving to Chicago in 1910.

In Chicago Hecht began working for the Chicago Journal and eventually become a successful journalist. His interests were not limited to reporting; he also wrote a newspaper column, poetry, and plays. By the early 1920s, he was also a celebrated novelist.

Hecht’s reputation as a playwright was established in the 1920s. Though he had a play produced as early as 1917, his first Broadway show was The Egotist (1922).

His most popular plays were written in collaboration with Charles MacArthur (see below), a fellow Chicagoan with a newspaper background. Their most successful collaboration was The Front Page (1928), which drew on both their newspaper backgrounds and established a stereotype of reporters repeated on stage and screen.

In 1926 Hecht launched his Hollywood screenwriting career at the invitation of friend and already established screenwriter, Herman Mankiewicz. Although he wrote more than seventy scripts and was highly respected for his work, he considered scriptwriting as strictly a source of income, not an artistic endeavor.

Hecht directed and produced a number of his own films—several in collaboration with MacArthur. By the 1950s, he also worked in television after being blacklisted for his anti-British activities in the post-World War II era. He was a firm Zionist and supporter of Jewish causes, including independence for Israel. He died on April 18, 1964, in New York City.

MacArthur was born on November 5, 1895, in Scranton, Pennsylvania, the son of William Telfer and Georgeanna MacArthur. He spent his childhood in Scranton, but his family moved to Nyack, New York, while he was a teenager.

He enrolled in the Wilson Memorial Academy in order to prepare for a career in the clergy like his father. Realizing that he wanted to be a writer, he moved to Illinois and began his journalism career at his brother’s paper, Oak Leaves, in Oak Park, Illinois. Between 1914 and 1923, interrupted only by a brief stint in the armed services during World War I, MacArthur was a hard-drinking reporter at some of the best papers in Chicago, including the Chicago Tribune.

In 1923, MacArthur’s life changed dramatically when he moved to New York City. His first produced play was Lulu Belle (1926), a commercial hit written with Edward Sheldon.

After a chance meeting with Hecht on the streets in New York City—they were acquaintances from Chicago’s newspaper scene—the pair collaborated on what became their defining play, The Front Page.

Although MacArthur wrote several plays on his own and in collaboration with a few other writers, his most successful stage works were written with Hecht. Like Hecht, he also had some success as a solo screenwriter.

Hecht and MacArthur also wrote and produced four films together, including The Scoundrel (1935). MacArthur returned to journalism in 1947 when he became editor of Theatre Arts magazine, a post he held until 1950. On April 21, 1956, he died of an internal hemorrhage.