see page history
Overview edit
Bibliography
-
(1998)
Champagne for One
-
(1995)
The Golden Spiders
-
(1990)
Some Buried Caesar
-
(1983)
Fer-de-Lance
-
(1983)
Over My Dead Body
Personal edit
- Legal name: Rex Stout
- Birthdate: December 1, 1886
- Birthplace: Noblesville IN, America
- Nationality: American
- Gender: Male
- Official Website: http:///http://www.nerowolfe.org/
- Genres: Mystery, Crime, Novel, Literature, Detective novels
- Date of death: October 27, 1975 (aged 88)
- Burial location: (add)
Unbound edit
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Rex Stout was born in Noblesville, Indiana, and shortly afterward 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, and later Superintendent of Schools, who encouraged his children to read, and Rex had read the entire Bible twice by the time he was four years old. He was the state spelling bee champion at age 13 and also had a genius for numbers and calculation. As a child, and even late in life, you could hand him a piece of paper filled nine numbers across and nine down, he'd look it over and without hesitation pick up a pencil and write the total of the stacked numbers.
Stout attended Topeka High School, Kansas, and the University of Kansas, though he left college, he said, upon discovering he knew more than they did and was wasting his time, and joined the Navy. His sister, Ruth Stout, also authored several books on no-work gardening and some social commentaries.
He served from 1906 to 1908 in the U.S. Navy, as a yeoman on President Teddy Roosevelt's official yacht, and then spent the next four years working at about thirty different jobs in six states while he sold poems, stories, and articles to various magazines.
It was not his writing but his invention of a school banking system, Educational Thrift Service (ETS), in about 1916 that provided him the money to travel in Europe extensively. About 400 U.S. schools adopted his system for keeping track of small money deposits children saved in accounts at school, for which he was paid royalties. Also in 1916, living in New York City, Stout married Fay Kennedy of Topeka, Kansas. They separated in 1932. On December 21, 1932 Stout married Pola Weinbach Hoffmann, who was born in Poland and had previously been married to Wolfgang Hoffmann, son of famed designer Josef Hoffmann, in Vienna, Austria.
Stout started his literary career in the 1910s writing for the pulps, publishing romance, adventure, and some borderline detective stories, but abandoned writing when his school banking system, ETS, became a success. Stout resigned from ETS and returned to writing in 1927. In 1929 Stout lost most of the money he had made as a businessman.
In Paris in 1929 he wrote his first book, How Like a God, an unusual psychological story written in the second person; the entire story takes place in a man's memory as he climbs a staircase.
Upon returning to the New York area in 1930, with the hired help of seven young men from nearby farms, Stout himself built the modern concrete hilltop house he'd live in the rest of his life, later named High Meadow by wife Pola.
During the course of his career Stout mastered a variety of literary forms, including the short story, the novel, and science fiction, among them a pioneering political thriller, The President Vanishes (1934), which was made into a motion picture that Stout said, "was better than the book, I think." Stout wrote a total of eleven non-mystery novels, including four originally published in magazine serial form, which received mixed reviews and brought him little income.
When his wife Pola was pregnant with their first child, in 1933, Stout met with friend and publisher John Farrar to figure out what he could write to provide income for his growing family. As a result, he turned to writing detective fiction. The first was Fer-de-Lance, which introduced Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin.
Fer-de-Lance was published by Farrar & Rinehart in October 1934, and was an immediate success. In 1937, Stout created Dol Bonner, a female private detective who would reappear in his Nero Wolfe stories and who is an early and significant example of the woman PI as fictional protagonist, in a novel called The Hand in the Glove. In 1939 Stout introduced detective Tecumseh Fox, and in 1941 he introduced Alphabet Hicks. But none reached the success of Nero Wolfe and Archie, and after 1941 Stout stuck solely with the Nero Wolfe series, writing at least one adventure each year until his death in 1975 at age 88.
During WWII Stout cut back on his detective writing, joined the Fight for Freedom organization and Chaired the Writer's War Board, a propaganda-producing organization that coordinated volunteer services of American writers for the war effort. Additionally, he hosted three weekly radio shows. After the war Stout returned to writing Nero Wolfe novels and took up the role of gentleman farmer on his High Meadow estate in Brewster, north of New York City. He served as president of the Authors Guild and Author's League 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 the British humorist P. G. Wodehouse, writer of the Jeeves novels and short stories. Each was a fan of the other's work, and there are evident parallels 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.
At his death, Stout was survived by his wife Pola, their two daughters Barbara and Rebecca, and five grandchildren, Lizbeth, Reed, Christopher, Lisa and Rachel.
http://www.nerowolfe.org/htm/stout/author.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Stout
His father was a teacher, and later Superintendent of Schools, who encouraged his children to read, and Rex had read the entire Bible twice by the time he was four years old. He was the state spelling bee champion at age 13 and also had a genius for numbers and calculation. As a child, and even late in life, you could hand him a piece of paper filled nine numbers across and nine down, he'd look it over and without hesitation pick up a pencil and write the total of the stacked numbers.
Stout attended Topeka High School, Kansas, and the University of Kansas, though he left college, he said, upon discovering he knew more than they did and was wasting his time, and joined the Navy. His sister, Ruth Stout, also authored several books on no-work gardening and some social commentaries.
He served from 1906 to 1908 in the U.S. Navy, as a yeoman on President Teddy Roosevelt's official yacht, and then spent the next four years working at about thirty different jobs in six states while he sold poems, stories, and articles to various magazines.
It was not his writing but his invention of a school banking system, Educational Thrift Service (ETS), in about 1916 that provided him the money to travel in Europe extensively. About 400 U.S. schools adopted his system for keeping track of small money deposits children saved in accounts at school, for which he was paid royalties. Also in 1916, living in New York City, Stout married Fay Kennedy of Topeka, Kansas. They separated in 1932. On December 21, 1932 Stout married Pola Weinbach Hoffmann, who was born in Poland and had previously been married to Wolfgang Hoffmann, son of famed designer Josef Hoffmann, in Vienna, Austria.
Stout started his literary career in the 1910s writing for the pulps, publishing romance, adventure, and some borderline detective stories, but abandoned writing when his school banking system, ETS, became a success. Stout resigned from ETS and returned to writing in 1927. In 1929 Stout lost most of the money he had made as a businessman.
In Paris in 1929 he wrote his first book, How Like a God, an unusual psychological story written in the second person; the entire story takes place in a man's memory as he climbs a staircase.
Upon returning to the New York area in 1930, with the hired help of seven young men from nearby farms, Stout himself built the modern concrete hilltop house he'd live in the rest of his life, later named High Meadow by wife Pola.
During the course of his career Stout mastered a variety of literary forms, including the short story, the novel, and science fiction, among them a pioneering political thriller, The President Vanishes (1934), which was made into a motion picture that Stout said, "was better than the book, I think." Stout wrote a total of eleven non-mystery novels, including four originally published in magazine serial form, which received mixed reviews and brought him little income.
When his wife Pola was pregnant with their first child, in 1933, Stout met with friend and publisher John Farrar to figure out what he could write to provide income for his growing family. As a result, he turned to writing detective fiction. The first was Fer-de-Lance, which introduced Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin.
Fer-de-Lance was published by Farrar & Rinehart in October 1934, and was an immediate success. In 1937, Stout created Dol Bonner, a female private detective who would reappear in his Nero Wolfe stories and who is an early and significant example of the woman PI as fictional protagonist, in a novel called The Hand in the Glove. In 1939 Stout introduced detective Tecumseh Fox, and in 1941 he introduced Alphabet Hicks. But none reached the success of Nero Wolfe and Archie, and after 1941 Stout stuck solely with the Nero Wolfe series, writing at least one adventure each year until his death in 1975 at age 88.
During WWII Stout cut back on his detective writing, joined the Fight for Freedom organization and Chaired the Writer's War Board, a propaganda-producing organization that coordinated volunteer services of American writers for the war effort. Additionally, he hosted three weekly radio shows. After the war Stout returned to writing Nero Wolfe novels and took up the role of gentleman farmer on his High Meadow estate in Brewster, north of New York City. He served as president of the Authors Guild and Author's League 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 the British humorist P. G. Wodehouse, writer of the Jeeves novels and short stories. Each was a fan of the other's work, and there are evident parallels 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.
At his death, Stout was survived by his wife Pola, their two daughters Barbara and Rebecca, and five grandchildren, Lizbeth, Reed, Christopher, Lisa and Rachel.
http://www.nerowolfe.org/htm/stout/author.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rex_Stout
