[citation needed] After the United States entered World War II following the Attack on Pearl Harbor, he served from 1942 to 1945 in the U.S. Army Air Corps as a journalist, attaining the rank of major.
[13] A Depression-era, bildungsroman memoir, it tells the story of a boy struggling to survive on his own in a hotel in St. Louis, after his mother is committed to a sanatorium with tuberculosis and his younger brother is sent to live with an uncle.
His father, a German immigrant and traveling salesman working for the Hamilton Watch Company, is off on long trips from which the boy cannot be certain he will return.
[citation needed] Hotchner's play The White House starred Helen Hayes in a Broadway production staged at Henry Miller's Theater in 1964.
In addition, Hotchner wrote A Short Happy Life, The Hemingway Hero, Exactly Like You (written with Coleman), and The World of Nick Adams.
[citation needed] Hotchner's play Sweet Prince was produced off-Broadway in 1982, at the Theater Off-Park, starring Keir Dullea and Ian Abercrombie.
[16] Hotchner resided with his wife Virginia Kiser in Westport, Connecticut, where he spent most weekends, and cared for a grey parrot.