George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress) · Public domain

Born Elmer Leopold Reizenstein, Rice won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Street Scene, a 1929 play that widened Broadway's frame to include the crowded, striving life of a New York tenement block. His earlier play The Adding Machine, an expressionist fable about a man replaced by a machine, helped bring European experimental theatre techniques into American drama.