Alfred Ernest Rice

Alfred Ernest Rice is remembered for An Oregon Girl: A Tale of American Life in the New West, first published in Portland, Oregon, in 1914. The novel is set in Portland and follows a tangle of relationships shaped by ambition, deception, and social expectations, giving modern readers a period view of life in the early 20th-century Northwest.

Reliable biographical details about him are limited, but genealogical records indicate that he was born in Plymouth, England, in 1851, later immigrated to the United States, and spent much of his adult life in Portland, Oregon. He died in 1933.

That scarcity of personal information makes the novel itself especially important. It suggests a writer closely interested in Oregon life and in the emotional pressures of a fast-changing society, which helps give his fiction its local color and lasting historical curiosity.