Elmer Rice, The Adding Machine

Nils Clausson (University of Regina)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.3: American (US) Writing and Culture: The Early Twentieth-century , 1900-1945.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1923

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Play

Resources

The Adding Machine (1923), Elmer Rice’s most famous play, is one of the earliest examples of Expressionism in the American theatre. Expressionism emerged in European theatre, especially in Germany, after World War I. Representative examples include Georg Kaiser’s Gas (1918) and Ernst Toller’s Mass and Man (1920), although these plays had been anticipated by such dramas as August Strindberg’s The Spook Sonata (1907) and Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening (1906; composed 1890-91). The earliest examples of Expressionism in America include Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922), John Howard Lawson’s Roger Bloomer (1923) and Processional …

Please log in to consult the article in its entirety. If you are a member (student of staff) of a subscribing institution (see List), you should be able to access the LE on campus directly (without the need to log in), and off-campus either via the institutional log in we offer, or via your institution's remote access facilities, or by creating a personal user account with your institutional email address. If you are not a member of a subscribing institution, you will need to purchase a personal subscription. For more information on how to subscribe as an individual user, please see under Individual Subcriptions.

3370 words

Citation: Clausson, Nils. "The Adding Machine". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 18 August 2012 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=34380, accessed 23 November 2024.]

Save this article