Stout, Rex, 1886-1975

<p>Stout, Rex (01 December 1886–27 October 1975), mystery writer, was born Rex Todhunter Stout in Noblesville, Indiana, the son of John Wallace Stout, a newspaper editor and school superintendent, and Lucetta Todhunter. In 1887 the Stouts moved to Kansas, where Rex and his eight siblings spent their youth. Stout was a brilliant child. According to his primary biographer, John McAleer, Stout had read the Bible twice by the time he was five years old, read his father’s library of more than a thousand books by age of eleven, and was a mathematical prodigy. In 1903, after graduating from high school at sixteen, he left for the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Despite his talents, Stout was unable to pay tuition and found no support at the university.</p>

<p>He went to Topeka and took jobs as an usher and a bookkeeper for the next two years. In 1904 he sold his first work, a poem that was never published, to Smart Set for $12.

In 1905 Stout joined the navy and worked on President Theodore Roosevelt’s yacht, the Mayflower, as pay-yeoman until 1907. He then bought his discharge for $80 and wandered the country working odd jobs, commonly bookkeeping. Between 1907 and 1911 Stout was essentially rootless. He lived in twelve states in as many months, and his most notable literary achievement was the sale of three more poems to Smart Set and two stories to Short Stories. Stout’s travels, however, roused his interest in a writing career.

In 1912 Stout moved to New York and began a remarkably productive period. In the next five years he turned out four novels, all published in periodicals, and thirty more short stories. The period ended in 1916 when he married Fay Kennedy and joined his brother Bob Stout in business. Stout would not again write for publication until 1929.

Stout’s brother had conceived the idea of a school banking system that would arrange savings programs for schoolchildren. In exchange for one-third ownership, Stout created and implemented a method of operating his brother’s system. In 1926 he secured financial independence by selling his share of the business to his brother, which left him free to pursue his interests in the publishing industry and continue his writing.</p>
<p>Stout’s second career as a novelist began in Europe. He and Fay spent 1927 to 1929 in Paris, where How like a God, Stout’s first novel published in book form, was finished. The two then returned to the United States and built a home, “High Meadow,” in Connecticut near Brewster, New York. At High Meadow Stout led an orderly, focused life and mostly engaged in writing and gardening. Fay, however, was not content with country life and continued to live in the city where she could maintain her social affairs. The childless marriage ended in divorce in 1931. Stout married Pola Hoffmann in 1932, and the couple had two daughters.

Between 1929 and 1934 Stout produced four more novels: Seed on the Wind (1930), Golden Remedy (1931), Forest Fire (1933), and The President Vanishes (1934). These novels, along with How like a God, received mixed reviews in the United States and England. While critics claimed that the novels attempted to compete with William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and Joseph Conrad and were known as Stout’s “serious fiction” (Anderson, p. 6), they were neither popularly nor critically successful. Fer-de-Lance (1934), the first Nero Wolfe detective story, marked the beginning of Stout’s fame.</p>
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As World War II enveloped America, Stout became an active propagandist for the war effort and democracy. In 1941 he helped to sponsor the Fight for Freedom Committee and Freedom House, was elected president of Friends of Democracy in 1942, and helped form the Society for the Prevention of World War III in 1944. As chairman of the Writers’ War Board, Stout hosted the radio series “Victory Volunteers” and created and conducted the CBS weekly radio series “Our Secret Weapon.”

After the war, Stout fought for writers’ economic rights. He had served as president of Vanguard Press (1925–1928) and had helped bring out leftist books otherwise not likely to be published. He again followed his interest in helping writers and in 1945 became president of the Authors’ Guild, a position that helped him increase the royalties paid by paperback publishers. He was also a founder of the Writers’ Board for World Government (1949), was elected president of the Authors’ League in 1951, and was appointed president of Mystery Writers of America in 1958.

His ongoing commitment to democracy and his outspoken anticommunist attitude refute a 1950 accusation by Merwin Hart to the House’s Select Committee to Investigate Lobbying Activities that Stout was a communist. An affiliation with the New Masses—a liberal-arts magazine that later adopted a communist agenda—was cited as evidence of Stout’s misconduct. In turn, he initiated an attack on McCarthyism through his position as president of the Authors’ League.

Rex Stout, civil libertarian, politician, and writer, received international accolades. His admirers included Oliver Wendell Holmes, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hubert Humphrey, John Wayne, John Steinbeck, Marlene Dietrich, and the Maharajah of Indore. P. G. Wodehouse wrote, “His narrative and dialogue could not be improved, and he passes the supreme test of being rereadable” (McAleer, foreword). Readers find much more to the Nero Wolfe stories than the usual crime fiction and find much more to Stout than the writer of mysteries.</p>

<p>Rex Todhunter Stout (December 1, 1886 – October 27, 1975) was an American writer noted for his detective fiction. 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 best-known characters are the detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin, who were featured in 33 novels and 39 novellas between 1934 and 1975.</p>
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In 1959, Stout received the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award. The Nero Wolfe corpus was nominated Best Mystery Series of the Century at Bouchercon XXXI, the world's largest mystery convention, and Rex Stout was nominated Best Mystery Writer of the Century.

In addition to writing fiction, Stout was a prominent public intellectual for decades. Stout was active in the early years of the American Civil Liberties Union and a founder of the Vanguard Press. He served as head of the Writers' War Board during World War II, became a radio celebrity through his numerous broadcasts, and was later active in promoting world federalism. He was the long-time president of the Authors Guild, during which he sought to benefit authors by lobbying for reform of the domestic and international copyright laws,[specify] and served a term as president of the Mystery Writers of America.<p>