[2] A child of the tenements, Rice spent much of his youth reading, to his family's consternation, and later observed, "Nothing in my life has been more helpful than the simple act of joining the library.

Co-authored with a friend, Frank Harris (not the famed Oscar Wilde biographer), the play was purportedly the first American drama to employ the technique of reverse-chronology, telling the story from its conclusion to its starting-point.

On Trial then went on tour throughout the United States with three separate companies and was produced in Argentina, Austria, Canada, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Hungary, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, Norway, Scotland and South Africa.

(He had been firmly converted to socialism in his teens, he said, by reading George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, Maxim Gorky, Frank Norris, and Upton Sinclair.

[7]) He frequented Greenwich Village, then the most bohemian part of New York City, in the late 1910s and became friendly with many socially conscious writers and activists, including the African-American poet James Weldon Johnson and the illustrator Art Young.

[8] After writing four more plays of no special distinction, Rice startled audiences in 1923 with his next contribution to the theatre, the boldly expressionistic The Adding Machine, which he wrote in 17 days.

[11] Directed with great ingenuity by Philip Moeller, designed by Lee Simonson, and produced by the Theatre Guild, the play starred Dudley Digges (actor) and Edward G. Robinson, then at the start of his acting career.

When Dorothy Parker was at work on her play the following year (loosely based on fellow Algonquin Round Table member Robert Benchley, his marital problems, and the extra-marital temptations he was grappling with) and needed a co-author, she approached Elmer Rice, now acknowledged as the Broadway "boy wonder" of the moment.

(1927) and The Gay White Way (1928) and two collaborations, Wake Up, Jonathan (1928) with Hatcher Hughes, a dramatist unknown today and Cock Robin (1929) with Philip Barry, a Broadway name equal to Rice's.

Originally entitled Landscape with Figures, Street Scene (1929), later the subject of an opera by Kurt Weill, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for its realistic chronicle of life in the slums.

"With fifty characters casually strolling through it," Brooks Atkinson wrote, "it looked like an improvisation...Based on the facade of a house at 25 West 65th Street, which Rice selected as typical, the tall massive setting caught the tone and humanity of a decaying brownstone.

After the failure of these plays, Rice returned to Broadway in 1937 to write and direct for the Playwrights' Company, which he had helped to establish along with Maxwell Anderson, S. N. Behrman, Sidney Howard, and Robert E. Sherwood.

[18] (In 1932, Rice reluctantly supported the Communist Party candidate in the presidential election because he found Hoover and Roosevelt equally displeasing alternatives with an insufficient grasp of the crisis the country faced.

[20] He 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.

"[20] The Theatre Guild turned the script down flat; Broadway would never be ready for the level of experimentation that inspired Rice, a reality that was a source of continuous frustration for him.

[21] He 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.

[23] 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.

The collection spans over 100 boxes and includes contracts, correspondence, manuscript drafts, notebooks, photographs, royalty statements, scripts, theater programs, and over seventy-three scrapbooks.