Edward "Ed" Rice (October 23, 1918 – August 8, 2001) was an American author, publisher, photojournalist and painter, best known as a close friend and biographer of Thomas Merton. Rice wrote more than 20 books, including Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton, a best-selling 1990 biography of the famous 19th-century explorer, and was the founder (1953) of Jubilee magazine.
Rice attended Columbia University, where he become close friends with Merton, Robert Lax, and Robert Giroux (who later co-founded Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Rice was editor of the Jester humor magazine in his senior year; he graduated in 1940.
Rice chronicled his friendship with Merton in the 1970 book The Man in the Sycamore Tree: The Good Times and Hard Life of Thomas Merton. Also in 1970, he published John Frum He Come, a book documenting the South Pacific cargo cults -- a subject Merton was also interested in.
Famous quotes containing the word rice:
“The arbitrary division of one’s life into weeks and days and hours seemed, on the whole, useless. There was but one day for the men, and that was pay day, and one for the women, and that was rent day. As for the children, every day was theirs, just as it should be in every corner of the world.”
—Alice Caldwell Rice (1870–1942)