Gaily, Gaily

Made into a movie with Beau Bridgeshttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaily,_Gaily
With the vigor and gusto invariably associated with his personality and
his works, Ben Hecht recreates in this volume the lusty Chicago of the
early twentieth century, as seen from its underside by a cub reporter on
a great metropolitan daily. He introduces the reader to a vast cast of
eccentric characters-bums, criminals, prostitutes, politicians, and
poets, not to mention the police. He conducts you to the scenes of the
crimes. He invites you to the courtroom and the murderer’s solitary cell
and to the gallows. He lets you sit around with him in the city room of
a great Chicago newspaper, where he collected considerable material for
that newspaper classic, The Front Page, which he wrote in collaboration
with Charles MacArthur.Some of these stories are bizarre. Most of them
are bawdy. But they are all imbued with lusty vitality and with a kind
of innocent wonder that life is really so much stranger than fiction.
The author looks back on the whole era with the consistently-unchanged
fresh eye of youth. He is less concerned with nostalgia than reporting
the way it was.