Background

Alice Hegan Rice was born January 11, 1870 in Shelbyville, Kentucky, at the homestead of her maternal grandfather, Judge James Caldwell. She was the older of two children and only daughter of Samuel Watson Hegan, an art dealer of Irish descent, and Sallie (Caldwell) Hegan, whose family had come to Kentucky from Virginia in 1800.

Education

Alice was reared in the Campbellite faith and because of delicate health received her early education at home.

She received honorary degrees from Rollins College (1928, with her husband) and the University of Louisville (1937).

Career

She enjoyed making up stories and plays to entertain her young cousins, and when at the age of ten she entered Miss Hampton's private school for girls in Louisville, she wrote sketches for the school paper. When she was fifteen the Louisville Courier-Journal printed a humorous article she had submitted anonymously.

At sixteen Alice Hegan began assisting in a mission Sunday school in a Louisville slum known as the Cabbage Patch. There she was impressed with the way the poor "met their problems and triumphed over their difficulties. Looking for the nobility that lay hidden in the most unpromising personality became for me a spiritual treasure hunt". With Louise Marshall, she later (1910) founded the Cabbage Patch Settlement House, which by the time of her death had grown to include a paid staff and more than a hundred volunteer workers.

After finishing school Miss Hegan made her debut into Louisville society. She continued to engage in charitable work and became a member of the Authors Club of Louisville, a group of young women who aspired to become writers. With their encouragement, she wrote her first novel, Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch, a story built around an old woman she knew who often came begging for food but displayed courage and a sense of humor in the face of poverty. Submitted to the publisher S. S. McClure, the novel was accepted at once and on its publication (1901) became a best seller. In the next forty years it sold more than 500, 000 copies, was translated into a number of foreign languages, and became a success as a stage play and as a movie.

Miss Hegan was married to Cale Young Rice. Going to New York for their honeymoon, they were invited to join McClure and his party on a trip to Europe, where Alice met and formed a lasting friendship with the writer Ida Tarbell. The Rices established their permanent home in Louisville and often spent their summers in Maine, they made many long trips to Europe and the Orient, their travels providing material for some of Mrs. Rice's fiction and her husband's poetry. Although remembered only as a "period" writer, Alice Hegan Rice was one of the most famous authors of her day.

She published twenty novels and numerous short stories, some of the latter written in collaboration with her husband. Of her novels, Lovey Mary (1903) was a sequel to Mrs. Wiggs. Sandy (1905), which the Century magazine serialized, was a fictional account of S. S. McClure, based on his reminiscences of his youth. Captain June (1907) depicted child life in Japan. Perhaps her most serious novel was Mr. Opp (1909), which portrayed a man who, though a failure in a worldly sense, maintained self-respect by caring for his mentally incompetent sister and choosing to regard his life as a success. Mrs. Rice's own favorite among her novels was Mr. Pete & Co. (1933), the story of a junk dealer whom she met along the Louisville waterfront. In her autobiography, The Inky Way (1940), she attributed the wide appeal of her books to the "exaggerated sensibility that made things appear a bit funnier or a bit more pathetic [to her] than to the average person. " Though she romanticized the poor and their problems in her tales, she had a genuine concern for them and was not content merely to make people laugh or cry about their miseries; Calvary Alley (1917) was a strong plea to alleviate intolerable housing conditions. During a long period of ill health in the 1920's Mrs. Rice produced very little, but when the onset of the depression brought financial problems she resumed writing.

She died of a coronary occlusion at her Louisville home shortly after her seventy-second birthday, and was buried in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville. Her husband, desolate without her, committed suicide little more than a year later.

Achievements

• She wrote over two dozen books, the most famous of which is Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. The book was a best seller in 1902 and is set in Louisville, Kentucky where she then lived. It was made into a successful play in 1903, and there were three Hollywood movie versions of it. The best known is the 1934 film starring Pauline Lord and W. C. Fields.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Happiness Road (Classic Reprint)

    (Excerpt from Happiness Road A few weeks before Alice Heg...)

  • Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch

    (Leopold Classic Library is delighted to publish this clas...)

  • Calvary Alley

    (This book was converted from its physical edition to the ...)

  • Calvary Alley

    (The Library of Alexandria is an independent small busines...)

  • Quin
  • Miss Mink's Soldier and Other Stories
  • The Honorable Percival
  • Captain June
  • Sandy
  • Mr. Opp
  • Lovey Mary

Connections

On December 18, 1902, Miss Hegan was married to Cale Young Rice, a Harvard graduate and an instructor at Cumberland University, whose first volume of poetry had recently been published. The Rices had no children.

Father:

Samuel Watson Hegan

An art dealer of Irish descent

Mother:

Sallie (Caldwell) Hegan

Spouse:

Cale Young Rice