Rex Stout

Stout was born in Noblesville, Indiana, in 1886, but shortly afterwards his Quaker parents John Wallace Stout and Lucetta Elizabeth Todhunter Stout moved their family (nine children in all) to Kansas.

His father was a teacher who encouraged his son to read, leading to Rex having read the entire Bible twice by the age of four. At age thirteen he was the state spelling bee champion. Stout attended Topeka High School, Kansas, and the University of Kansas, Lawrence. His sister, Ruth Stout, also authored several books on no-work gardening and some social commentaries.

He served in the U.S. Navy from 1906 to 1908 (including service as a yeoman on Theodore Roosevelt's presidential yacht) and then spent about the next four years working at a series of jobs in six states, including cigar-store clerk.

In 1910–11, Stout sold three short poems to the literary magazine The Smart Set. Between 1912 and 1918, he published more than forty works of fiction in various magazines, ranging from literary publications such as Smith's Magazine and Lippincott's Monthly Magazine to pulp magazines like the All-Story Weekly.

Stout invented a school banking system around 1916, which he promoted with his brother Robert. About 400 U.S. schools adopted his system for keeping track of the money that school children saved in accounts at school. Royalties from this work provided Stout with enough money to travel in Europe extensively during the 1920s.

In 1916, Stout married Fay Kennedy of Topeka, Kansas. They divorced in February 1932{{Rp|xx|date=October 2013}} and, in December 1932, Stout married Pola Weinbach Hoffmann, a designer who had studied with Josef Hoffmann in Vienna.{{Rp|234–236|date=October 2013}}{{efn|Born in Stryj, Poland, Pola Weinbach Hoffmann Stout (1902–1984) studied at the Vienna School of Design. She and her first husband, Wolfgang Hoffmann—son of the famous architect and Wiener Werkstätte co-founder Josef Hoffmann—were a prominent design team when they emigrated to the United States in 1925.{{cite journal |date=2001 |title=Shaping the Modern: American Decorative Arts at The Art Institute of Chicago, 1917–65 |journal=Modern Solutions |publisher=Art Institute of Chicago |volume=27 |issue=2 |page=52 |isbn=9780865591875 }}}}{{efn|Pola Stout was an influential textile designer after her second marriage.{{cite book |editor-last=Kirkham |editor-first=Pat |date=2000 |title=Women Designers in the USA, 1900–2000 |location=New Haven, Connecticut |publisher=Yale University Press |page=151 |isbn=9780300093315 }}}}

File:Information Please 1 premiere.jpg, Stout was featured in the first of 18 RKO-Pathé short film versions that screened in American theaters. Sitting on the steps of the Radio City Music Hall lobby after the September 1939 premiere are (from left) Pathé chief Frederic Ullman Jr., Stout, director Frank P. Donovan, John Kieran, Franklin P. Adams and Dan Golenpaul, creator of the radio program.]]

File:Stout-Family-High-Meadow-Look-1940.jpg, February 13, 1940)]]

Rex Stout began his literary career in the 1910s writing for magazines, particularly pulp magazines, writing more than 40 stories that appeared between 1912 and 1918. Stout's early stories appeared most frequently in All-Story Magazine and its affiliates, but he was also published in magazines as varied as Smith's Magazine, Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, Short Stories, The Smart Set, Young's Magazine, and Golfers Magazine. The early stories spanned genres including romance, adventure, science fiction/fantasy, and detective fiction, including two murder mystery novellas ("Justice Ends at Home" and The Last Drive) that prefigured elements of the Wolfe stories.

By 1916, Stout grew tired of writing a story whenever he needed money. He decided to stop writing until he had made enough money to support himself through other means, so he would be able to write when and as he pleased. He wrote no fiction for more than a decade, until the late 1920s, when he had saved substantial money through his school banking system. Ironically, just as Stout was starting to write fiction again, he lost most of the money that he had made as a businessman in the Great Depression of 1929.

In 1929, Stout wrote his first published book, How Like a God, an unusual psychological story written in the second person. The novel was published by the Vanguard Press, which he had helped to found. Stout published a total of four psychological novels between 1929 and 1933, the first three with Vanguard and the fourth at Farrar & Rinehart, to which he was recruited by editor John C. Farrar.

In the 1930s, Stout turned to writing detective fiction, a genre that he and Farrar thought might be more financially rewarding than his previous novels. In 1933, he wrote Fer-de-Lance, which introduced Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin. The novel was published by Farrar & Rinehart in October 1934, and in abridged form as "Point of Death" in The American Magazine (November 1934). The same year, Stout also published a political thriller The President Vanishes (1934), which was originally published anonymously.

Fer-de-Lance was the first of 72 Nero Wolfe stories (33 novels and 39 novellas) that Stout published from 1934 to 1975. Stout continued writing the Nero Wolfe series for the rest of his life. Beginning in 1940, Nero Wolfe began to appear in novellas as well as full-length novels, at the behest of his editors at The American Magazine. Stout wrote at least one Nero Wolfe story every year through 1966 (except in 1943, when war-related activities took priority). Stout's rate of production declined somewhat after 1966, but he still published four further Nero Wolfe novels prior to his death in 1975, at the age of 88.

The characters of Wolfe and Goodwin are considered among Stout's main contributions to detective fiction. Wolfe was described by reviewer Will Cuppy as "that Falstaff of detectives".{{cite book |last=McAleer |first=John J. |date=1977 |title=Rex Stout: A Biography |location=Boston |publisher=Little, Brown and Company |isbn=9780316553407 }}{{Rp|287}}{{cite book |editor-last=Rothe |editor-first=Anna |date=1947 |title=Current Biography, 1946: Who's News and Why |location=New York |publisher=H. W. Wilson Co. |page=576 |isbn=9780824201128 }}{{efn|Essays by both Will Cuppy ("How to Read a Whodunit") and Rex Stout ("Watson Was a Woman") appeared in The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Howard Haycroft (Simon and Schuster, 1946). Cuppy likened Wolfe to Falstaff in 1936, in his review of The Rubber Band. In 1959, Stout's beloved character Hattie Annis stated the comparison to Wolfe himself, immediately after being introduced to him in the novella "Counterfeit for Murder".}}

Stout also wrote several non-Wolfe mystery novels during the 1930s, but none approached the success of the Nero Wolfe books. In 1937, Stout's novel The Hand in the Glove introduced the character of Theodolinda "Dol" Bonner, a female private detective who is an early and significant example of the female PI as fictional protagonist. Bonner would also appear as a character in some later Nero Wolfe stories. Stout also created two other detective protagonists, Tecumseh Fox (who appeared in three books) and Alphabet Hicks (one book). His novel Red Threads featured Inspector Cramer, a familiar character from the Wolfe books, working on his own. After 1938, Stout wrote no fiction but mysteries, and after 1941, almost entirely Nero Wolfe stories.

During World War II, Stout cut back on his detective writing to focus on war-related activities. For four years, he chaired the Writers' War Board, which coordinated the volunteer services of American writers to help the war effort. He also joined the Fight for Freedom organization and hosted three weekly radio shows. After the war, in addition to continuing to write the Nero Wolfe books, Stout supported democracy and world government. He served as president of the Authors Guild and of the Mystery Writers of America, which in 1959 presented Stout with the Grand Master Award – the pinnacle of achievement in the mystery field.

Stout was a longtime friend of British humorist P. G. Wodehouse, writer of the Jeeves novels and short stories. Each was a fan of the other's work, and parallels are evident between their characters and techniques. Wodehouse contributed the foreword to Rex Stout: A Biography, John McAleer's Edgar Award-winning 1977 biography of the author (reissued in 2002 as Rex Stout: A Majesty's Life). Wodehouse also mentions Rex Stout in several of his Jeeves books, as both Bertie and his Aunt Dahlia are fans.

In the fall of 1925, Roger Nash Baldwin appointed Rex Stout to the board of the American Civil Liberties Union's powerful National Council on Censorship; Stout served one term.{{Rp|196–197|date=October 2013}} Stout helped start the radical Marxist magazine The New Masses, which succeeded The Masses and The Liberator in 1926.{{cite book |last=Aaron |first=Daniel |author-link=Daniel Aaron |date=1992 |title=Writers on the Left: Episodes in Literary Communism |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=smr4WKZNUEMC&q=rex+stout+clarence+darrow&pg=PA102 |location=New York |publisher=Columbia University Press |page=102 |isbn=9780231080385 }} He had been told that the magazine was primarily committed to bringing arts and letters to the masses, but he realized after a few issues "that it was Communist and intended to stay Communist", and he ended his association with it.{{Rp|197–198|date=October 2013}}

Stout was one of the officers and directors of the Vanguard Press, a publishing house established with a grant from the Garland Fund to reprint left-wing classics at an affordable cost and publish new books otherwise deemed "unpublishable" by the commercial press of the day. He served as Vanguard's first president from 1926 to 1928, and continued as vice president until at least 1931. During his tenure, Vanguard issued 150 titles, including seven books by Scott Nearing and three of Stout's own novels—How Like a God (1929), Seed on the Wind (1930), and Golden Remedy (1931).{{Rp|196–197|date=October 2013}}

In 1942, Stout described himself as a "pro-Labor, pro-New Deal, pro-Roosevelt left liberal".{{cite web |url=http://jfk.hood.edu/Collection/Weisberg%20Harold%20Dies%20Committee%20Files/Dies%203-Ring%20Gray%20Binder/Dies%20Binder%2030.pdf |title=Manly, Chesly, 'Writer's War Board' Aids Smear Campaign. |publisher=Washington Times-Herald, June 4, 1942. The Harold Weisberg Archive, Digital Collection, Hood College |access-date=2013-10-25}}

During World War II, he worked with the advocacy group Friends of Democracy, chaired the Writers' War Board (a propaganda organization), and supported the embryonic United Nations. He lobbied for Franklin D. Roosevelt to accept a fourth term as president. He developed an extreme anti-German attitude and wrote the provocative essay "We Shall Hate, or We Shall Fail""[http://www.nerowolfe.org/pdf/stout/activism/war-time/1943_01_NYTimes_We_shall_hate_or_we_shall_fail.pdf We Shall Hate, or We Shall Fail]" (PDF), The New York Times, January 17, 1943, with response by Walter Russell Bowie and reply from Rex Stout; at The Wolfe Pack. Retrieved 2013-10-18. which generated a flood of protests after its January 1943 publication in The New York Times.{{cite book |editor1-last=Townsend |editor1-first=Guy M. |editor2-last=McAleer |editor2-first=John J. |editor3-last=Sapp |editor3-first=Judson C. |editor4-last=Schemer |editor4-first=Arriean |date=1980 |title=Rex Stout: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography |location=New York and London |publisher=Garland Publishing, Inc.|isbn=0-8240-9479-4 }}{{Rp|95}} The attitude is expressed by Nero Wolfe in the 1942 novella "Not Quite Dead Enough".

On August 9, 1942, Stout conducted the first of 62 wartime broadcasts of Our Secret Weapon on CBS Radio. The idea for the counterpropaganda series had been that of Sue Taylor White, wife of Paul White, the first director of CBS News. Research was done under White's direction. "Hundreds of Axis propaganda broadcasts, beamed not merely to the Allied countries but to neutrals, were sifted weekly", wrote Stout's biographer John McAleer. "Rex himself, for an average of twenty hours a week, pored over the typewritten yellow sheets of accumulated data ... Then, using a dialogue format – Axis commentators making their assertions, and Rex Stout, the lie detective, offering his refutations – he dictated to his secretary the script of the fifteen-minute broadcast." By November 1942, Berlin Radio was reporting that "Rex Stout himself has cut his own production in detective stories from four to one a year and is devoting the entire balance of his time to writing official war propaganda." Newsweek described Stout as "stripping Axis short-wave propaganda down to the barest nonsensicals ... There's no doubt of its success."{{Rp|121–122|date=October 2013}}{{Rp|305–307}}

In September 1942, Stout defended FDR's policy of sending Japanese-Americans to concentration camps in a debate with the Socialist civil libertarian Norman Thomas. Stout charged "that Japanese-Americans include more fifth columnists than any other comparable group in the United States." When Thomas condemned the military's role as a "disgrace to our democracy" and comparable to "the powers of totalitarian dictators," Stout responded that moving "Japanese-Americans inland hardly constitutes Totalitarianism."{{cite book | last=Beito | first=David T. | title=The New Deal's War on the Bill of Rights: The Untold Story of FDR's Concentration Camps, Censorship, and Mass Surveillance | edition=First | pages=185| location=Oakland | publisher=Independent Institute | year=2023 | isbn=978-1598133561}}

During the later part of the war and the post-war period, he also led the Society for the Prevention of World War III which lobbied for a harsh peace for Germany. When the war ended, Stout became active in the United World Federalists.Steven Casey, "The campaign to sell a harsh peace for Germany to the American public, 1944–1948." History 90.297 (2005): 62–92. [http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/archive/00000736 online]

House Committee on Un-American Activities chairman Martin Dies called him a Communist, and Stout is reputed to have said to him, "I hate Communists as much as you do, Martin, but there's one difference between us. I know what a Communist is and you don't."{{cite web |url=https://www.newspapers.com/newspage/29497223/ |title=CLAP-TRAP Some Quips That Flew In From the Air Front |date=26 April 1945 |publisher=Amarillo Globe-Times, April 26, 1945 |access-date=2013-10-26}}

Stout was one of many American writers closely watched by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Hoover considered him an enemy of the bureau and either a Communist or a tool of Communist-dominated groups. Stout's leadership of the Authors League of America during the McCarthy era was particularly irksome to the FBI. About a third of Stout's FBI file is devoted to his 1965 novel The Doorbell Rang.{{cite book |last=Mitgang |first=Herbert |author-link=Herbert Mitgang |date=1988 |title=Dangerous Dossiers: Exposing the Secret War Against America's Greatest Authors |location=New York |publisher=Donald I. Fine |isbn=1-55611-077-4 |url=https://archive.org/details/dangerousdossier00mitg_0 }}{{Rp|216–217, 227}}{{efn|For more information, see the articles on Where There's a Will and The Doorbell Rang.}}{{efn|In its April 1976 report, the Church Committee found that The Doorbell Rang is a reason that Rex Stout's name was one of 332 placed on the FBI's "not to contact list", which it cited as evidence of the FBI's political abuse of intelligence information.{{cite book |last=Final Report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities |date=1976 |chapter=E. Political Abuse of Intelligence Information, subfinding c, footnote 91 |title=Intelligence Activities and the Rights of Americans, Book II |chapter-url=https://archive.org/stream/finalreportofsel02unit#page/239/mode/1up |publisher=U.S. Government Printing Office |page=239 }}}}

In later years, Stout alienated some readers{{specify|date=June 2024}} with his hawkish stance on the Vietnam War and with the contempt for communism expressed in certain of his works. The latter viewpoint is given voice in the 1952 novella "Home to Roost" (first published as "Nero Wolfe and the Communist Killer") and most notably in the 1949 novel The Second Confession. In this work, Archie and Wolfe express their dislike for "Commies", while at the same time Wolfe arranges for the firing of a virulently anti-Communist broadcaster, likening him to Hitler and Mussolini.

Stout continued writing until just before his death. He died on October 27, 1975, at the age of 88 at his estate, High Meadow, on the New York/Connecticut border.{{cite web | url=https://findingaids.bc.edu/repositories/2/resources/94 | title=Collection: Rex Stout papers | Search Burns Archives }}

Image:Rex Stout 1973.jpg

{{blockquote|If he had done nothing more than to create Archie Goodwin, Rex Stout would deserve the gratitude of whatever assessors watch over the prosperity of American literature. For surely Archie is one of the folk heroes in which the modern American temper can see itself transfigured.|Jacques BarzunA Birthday Tribute to Rex Stout, The Viking Press, 1965; reprinted by permission in The Rex Stout Journal, number 2, Spring 1985, pp. 4–9}}

• In his seminal 1941 work, Murder for Pleasure, crime fiction historian Howard Haycraft included the first two Nero Wolfe novels, Fer-de-Lance and The League of Frightened Men, in his list of the most influential works of mystery fiction.{{cite web |url=http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/haycraftqueen.htm |title=Haycraft Queen Cornerstones Complete Checklist |author= |publisher=Classic Crime Fiction.com |access-date=2015-03-22}}
• In 1958, Rex Stout became the 14th president of the Mystery Writers of America.{{Rp|428}}
• In 1959, Stout received the MWA's prestigious Grand Master Award, which represents the pinnacle of achievement in the mystery field.{{Rp|429}}{{cite web |url=http://theedgars.com/awards/ |title=Edgars Database |website=The Edgar Awards |publisher=Mystery Writers of America |access-date=2015-03-22 |archive-date=2020-07-31 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20200731232503/http://theedgars.com/awards/ |url-status=dead }}
• In January 1969, the Crime Writers' Association selected Stout as recipient of its Silver Dagger Award for The Father Hunt, which it named "the best crime novel by a non-British author in 1969."{{Rp|499}}
• The Nero Wolfe corpus was nominated Best Mystery Series of the Century at the Bouchercon XXXI mystery convention, and Rex Stout was nominated Best Mystery Writer of the Century.{{cite news |last=Walker |first=Tom |date=September 10, 2000 |title=Mystery writers shine light on best: Bouchercon 2000 convention honors authors |newspaper=The Denver Post }}{{efn|The other four nominees for Mystery Writer of the Century at Bouchercon XXXI were Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett and Dorothy Sayers. Christie received the award, and Christie's Hercule Poirot was named Best Mystery Series of the Century.}}
• In 2014, Rex Stout was selected to the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

"A number of the paintings of René Magritte (1898–1967), the internationally famous Belgian painter, are named after titles of books by Rex Stout," wrote Harry Torczyner, Magritte's attorney and friend.{{Rp|578}}{{efn|McAleer quotes a letter dated May 24, 1974, that he received from Torczyner, a New York collector who was also Georges Simenon's attorney.}}{{efn|"We know the importance granted to the words by Magritte in his paintings and we know the impact that literary works such as Poe's, Rex Stout's or Mallarmé's had on him," wrote the Magritte Museum.{{cite web |url=http://www.magrittemuseum.be/code/en/main2_3.htm |title=The Brussels Surrealist Group |publisher=Magritte Museum |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20101125000329/http://magrittemuseum.be/code/en/main2_3.htm |archive-date=November 25, 2010 |access-date=2015-03-22}}}} "He read Hegel, Heidegger and Sartre, as well as Dashiell Hammett, Rex Stout and Georges Simenon," the Times Higher Education Supplement wrote of Magritte. "Some of his best titles were 'found' in this way."{{cite journal |last=Danchev |first=Alex |date=June 30, 2011 |title=Canny Resemblance |url=http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?storyCode=416652§ioncode=26 |journal=Times Higher Education Supplement |access-date=2015-03-22}} Magritte's 1942 painting Les compagnons de la peur ("The Companions of Fear") bears the title given to The League of Frightened Men (1935) when it was published in France by Gallimard (1939). It is one of Magritte's series of "leaf-bird" paintings, created during the Nazi occupation of Brussels. It depicts a stormy, mountainous landscape in which a cluster of plants has metamorphosed into a group of vigilant owls.{{cite web |url=http://www.mattesonart.com/1931-1942-brussels--pre-war-years.aspx |title=Rene Magritte Gallery, 1931–1942 |author= |website=Matteson Art |access-date=2015-03-22}}

Stout is also mentioned in Ian Fleming's James Bond book On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1963).{{citation needed|date=May 2020}}

The archival papers of Rex Stout anchor Boston College's collection of American detective fiction.{{cite web |url=http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/ulib/protof/port/coll-special2.html#detective |title=Special Collections Listing |date=April 25, 2000 |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131015044500/http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/ulib/protof/port/coll-special2.html |archive-date=October 15, 2013}} The Rex Stout papers were donated to the Burns Library by the Stout family in 1980 and includes manuscripts, correspondence, legal papers, personal papers, publishing contracts, photographs, and ephemera.{{cite web |title=Collection: Rex Stout papers |website=Burns Library Archival Collections |date=1975-10-27 |url=https://findingaids.bc.edu/repositories/2/resources/94 |access-date=2025-02-06}} The collection also includes first editions, international editions, and archived reprints of Stout's books, as well as volumes from Stout's personal library.

The comprehensive archive at Burns Library also includes the extensive research files of Stout's official biographer John J. McAleer,{{cite web |title=Collection: John J. McAleer faculty papers |website=Burns Library Archival Collections |date=1923-08-29 |url=https://findingaids.bc.edu/repositories/2/resources/20 |access-date=2025-02-06}} the Rex Stout collection of bibliographer Judson C. Sapp,{{cite web |title=Sapp, Judson C., 1972 |website=Burns Library Archival Collections |date=2025-02-06 |url=https://findingaids.bc.edu/repositories/2/archival_objects/10416 |access-date=2025-02-06}} and a collection of Nero Wolfe's magazine appearances donated by Ed Price.{{cite web |title=Collection: Ed Price collection of Rex Stout |website=Burns Library Archival Collections |url=https://findingaids.bc.edu/repositories/2/resources/436 |access-date=2025-02-06}}

{{Main|Rex Stout bibliography}}

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{{Reflist|30em}}

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• [http://www.nerowolfe.org The Wolfe Pack], official site of the Nero Wolfe Society
• [http://www.oocities.org/wrlouis/nero.html Merely a Genius...], Winnifred Louis' fan site dedicated to Nero Wolfe including a complete annotated bibliography
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20070930102533/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,913690,00.html Time] obituary (November 10, 1975)
• [http://markfullmer.com/mcaleer/index.html John J. McAleer: The Making of Rex Stout's Biography] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20081210035346/http://markfullmer.com/mcaleer/index.html |date=2008-12-10 }} (Mark Fullmer)
• Stout's radicalism, the FBI, the books (from the [https://web.archive.org/web/20051027052551/http://recollectionbooks.com/bleed/12ref.htm#RexStout Daily Bleed Calendar])
• [http://avenarius.sk/stout a comprehensive overview of Rex Stout's work and biography] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20030210220218/http://avenarius.sk/stout/ |date=2003-02-10 }}
• [http://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2009/01/tt-forty-years-with-nero-wolfe.html Forty years with Nero Wolfe] (January 12, 2009) by Terry Teachout
• [https://archive.today/20130113202045/http://stout.avenarius.sk/ wiki collections of quotations] from Rex Stout's works
• [http://fiction.eserver.org/short/stout/ Ten Rex Stout stories] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20080511213705/http://fiction.eserver.org/short/stout |date=2008-05-11 }} (1913–1917) at The EServer (Iowa State University)
• {{Gutenberg author |id=279 | name=Rex Stout}}
• {{Internet Archive author |sname=Rex Todhunter Stout}}
• {{Librivox author |id=897}}
• [http://www.classiccrimefiction.com/stoutbib.htm Bibliography of Stout's first editions in the United Kingdom]
• Wikiquote: Quote of the Day, December 1, 2013
• [http://hdl.handle.net/2345/1132 Rex Stout papers] at John J. Burns Library, Boston College (PDF)

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Category:1886 births

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Category:American mystery writers

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Category:Writers of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction

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Category:Edgar Award winners

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Category:Topeka High School alumni