Elmer Rice

Elmer Rice (1892-1967), American dramatist, born in New York, and educated in law at New York University. Instead of practising law, he began his career as a playwright with On Trial (1914), the first American play to use the flashback technique, important also in literature and films. Rice experimented with dramatic form. The Adding Machine, his Expressionist fantasy satirizing the dehumanizing effects of machines, was produced in 1923. Frequently, themes in his works stemmed from his identification with the underprivileged. His Street Scene (1929), a realistic drama that focused on the New York slums, received the 1929 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and in 1947 was made into an opera by the American poet Langston Hughes and the German-born American composer Kurt Weill. In the 1930s, Rice was New York regional director of the Federal Theatre Project. Included among Rice's other plays are Counsellor-at-Law (1931), We, the People (1933), Judgment Day (1934), A New Life (1943), and Dream Girl (1945) dealing with the subjects of the evils of Nazism, the poverty of the Great Depression, and racism. He also wrote novels, essays, and the autobiography Minority Report (1963).