Every Friday, Marilyn Knapp Litt, who blogs at ClassicKindle.com, brings us her recommendation of a free classic book to discover (or rediscover) on Kindle. Find more of Marilyn’s recommendations at her blog, ClassicKindle.com, a guide to the best free and inexpensive classic literature for the Kindle. You can also get Marilyn’s blog on Kindle and I recommend that you “Like” the Classic Kindle Facebook page as well so you don’t miss anything. Here’s Marilyn’s post:

I have spent well over a thousand afternoons in Chicago, many at Wrigley Field and many viewing the impressionist art at the Art Institute.  And I spent a few afternoons at the Billy Goat Pub.  Had Ben Hecht been of a different era, I am sure I would have run into him.

As it was, he toiled as newspaper writer in Chicago until the movies began to speak and he headed for Hollywood.  There he became one of the most successful writers and those who remember him, know him as one of the wittiest, whose humor still appeals to us.  (He co-wrote the play and movie script, “The Front Page”  and then switched the sexes and rewrote it at “His Girl Friday,”  one of the best of the screwball comedies.)

This is a collection of short pieces that were a column he did for the newspaper.  From the preface, “”One Thousand and One Afternoons” were launched in June, 1921. They were presented to the public as journalism extraordinary; journalism that invaded the realm of literature, where in large part, journalism really dwells.”Hecht wrote of a time and place that is not really gone, because the daily life of a great city tends to be the same, even over time. 

NOTES FOR A TRAGEDY Jan Pedlowski came home yesterday and found that his wife had run away. There was supper on the table. And under the soup plate was a letter addressed to Jan. It read, in Polish: “I am sick and tired. You keep on nagging me all the time and I can’t stand it any more. You will be better off without me.”Paula.”Jan ate his supper and then put his hat and coat on and went over to see the sergeant at the West Chicago Avenue police station. The sergeant appeared to be busy, so Jan waited. Then he stepped forward and said:”My wife has run away. I want to catch her.”The sergeant was lacking in sympathy. He told Jan to go home and wait and that the missus would probably come back. And that if she didn’t he could get a divorce. “I don’t want a divorce,” said Jan. “I want to catch her.”

Or,

Most of the things we have to deal with is chiefly murders and suicides and highway robberies, like the time old Alderman McGuire, who is dead now, was held up by two bandits while going home from a night session of the council, and he hypnotized one bandit. Yes, sir, you may wonder at that, but you didn’t know McGuire. He was a wonderful hypnotist, and he hypnotized the bandit, and just as the other one, who wasn’t hypnotized, was searching his pockets McGuire said to the hypnotized bandit, ‘You’re a policeman, shoot this highwayman.’ And the hypnotized one was the bandit who had the gun, and he turned around, as Alderman McGuire said, and shot the other, unhypnotized bandit and killed him. But when he reported the entire incident to the station–I was on duty that night–the captain wouldn’t believe it, and tried to argue McGuire into saying it was a accident, and that the gun had gone off accidentally and killed the unhypnotized bandit. But the alderman stuck to his story, and it was true, because the hypnotized bandit told me privately all about it when I took him down to Joliet.

Maybe you have to have lived in Chicago, where an Alderman is more important than a Congressman, but I believe this is one of the true stories!

Download your free copy of “A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago” by Ben Hecht here >>>