Elmer Rice (28 September 1892 – 8 May 1967) was an American playwright. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1929 play, Street Scene.
Rice was born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein in New York City, New York. After graduating cum laude from New York Law School in 1912, he began a short-lived legal career. He turned to writing, and his first play, the melodramatic On Trial (1914), was the first American stage production to employ the flashbac...
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Elmer Rice (28 September 1892 – 8 May 1967) was an American playwright. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for his 1929 play, Street Scene.
Rice was born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein in New York City, New York. After graduating cum laude from New York Law School in 1912, he began a short-lived legal career. He turned to writing, and his first play, the melodramatic On Trial (1914), was the first American stage production to employ the flashback technique of the screen.
His first major contribution to the theatre, however, was the expressionistic The Adding Machine (1923), which satirized the growing regimentation of man in the machine age through the life and death of the arid book-keeper, Mr. Zero.
Rice's next play, Street Scene (1929), later the subject of an opera by Kurt Weill, received the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for its realistic chronicle of life in the slums. The Left Bank (1931), described expatriation from America as an ineffectual escape from materialism, and Counsellor...
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