Alice Hegan Rice

Alice Hegan Rice, born Alice Caldwell Hegan on January 11, 1870, in Shelbyville, Kentucky, was an American novelist and Broadway performer. The daughter of Samuel Watson Hegan and Sallie P. Hegan, she died on February 10, 1942, at her home in Louisville, Kentucky, and was buried at Cave Hill Cemetery.

From an early age, Rice demonstrated a talent for storytelling, entertaining family members with improvised narratives and excelling in writing throughout her schooling. At fifteen, she had a piece published in a newspaper. Her perspective on social conditions shifted when she volunteered at a Sunday School mission located in a Louisville slum known as the Cabbage Patch. There, she managed a group of disruptive boys by drawing on a story she had recently read, and she continued telling them tales of gangsters and pirates for the remainder of the session. That encounter with poverty and the underprivileged directly shaped her most celebrated work, the 1901 novel Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.

Rice's Broadway career included an appearance in 1896 in Santa Maria. Her literary output ultimately became the more prominent dimension of her public life, encompassing twenty books. Several early works were translated into German, French, Danish, and Swedish, and three titles — Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, Mr. Opp, and A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill — were adapted for the stage. Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch was also the basis for four films, directed respectively by Harold Entwistle (1914), Hugh Ford (1919), Norman Taurog (1934), and Ralph Murphy (1942). Additional novels adapted for film include A Romance of Billy-Goat Hill (1916), Mr. Opp (1917), Sandy (1918), Sunshine Nan (1918), and Lovey Mary (1926).

On December 18, 1902, Rice married Cale Young Rice, a poet and playwright. The couple traveled extensively and became figures in the literary communities of both New York and London. Rice also channeled her concern for the poor into direct civic action, co-founding the Cabbage Patch Settlement House in Louisville in 1910, an institution aimed at improving the living and working conditions of impoverished residents.