21 Facts About Elmer Rice

Elmer Rice is best known for his plays The Adding Machine and his Pulitzer Prize-winning drama of New York tenement life, Street Scene.

Elmer Rice's grandfather was a political activist in the Revolutions of 1848 in the German states.

Elmer Rice spent most of his retirement years living with the Rice family and developed a close relationship with his grandson Elmer, who became a politically motivated writer and shared his grandfather's liberal and pacifist politics.

Elmer Rice's first play, On Trial, a melodramatic murder mystery, was a great success and ran for 365 performances in New York.

George M Cohan offered to buy the rights for $30,000, a proposition Rice declined largely because he did not believe Cohan could be serious.

When Dorothy Parker was at work on her play the following year and needed a co-author, she approached Elmer Rice, now acknowledged as the Broadway "boy wonder" of the moment.

Elmer Rice was a theatre professional by this time: open to collaboration, increasingly interested in producing and directing his own plays.

Elmer Rice's second hit proved to be his most lasting literary accomplishment.

Elmer Rice took over the direction himself and proved that it was highly stageworthy, if unconventional in its narrative style and disorienting naturalism.

Elmer Rice's plays of the 1930s included The Left Bank, a comedy dramatizing an expatriate's superficial attempt to escape from American materialism in Paris, and Counsellor-at-Law, a vigorous work that drew a realistic picture of the legal profession for which Elmer Rice had been trained.

Elmer Rice engaged an activist-minded cast and noted set designer Aline Bernstein to design the fifteen different sets that the ambitious play called for.

We, the People failed amid what Elmer Rice called "agitated" reviews.

Elmer Rice was the first director of the New York office of the Federal Theatre Project, but resigned in 1936 to protest government censorship of the Project's "Living Newspaper" dramatization of Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia.

Elmer Rice needed to make a living and, while deriding the commercialism of the New York stage, he managed to earn a considerable amount of money, but at a cost to his more experimental vision.

Elmer Rice was married in 1915 to Hazel Levy and had two children with her, Margaret and Robert.

Alhough born into a working-class family with no interest in the arts and known primarily for his attachment to theater and politics, Elmer Rice was passionate about Old Master and modern art.

Elmer Rice regularly frequented New York's museums, and in his autobiography, wrote of his first trip to Spain and the powerful impact Velazquez had on him and, in Mexico, of enjoying the work of Diego Rivera and the Mexican Muralists, artists who shared his political views.

Elmer Rice was close friends with Japanese-American modernist painter Yasuo Kuniyoshi.

Elmer Rice lived for many years on a wooded estate in Stamford, Connecticut until his death in Southampton, England in 1967 of pneumonia after suffering a heart attack.

Elmer Rice's papers were placed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin in 1968, a year after his death.

Elmer Rice was portrayed by the actor Jon Favreau in the 1994 film Mrs Parker and the Vicious Circle.