Rex Stout Biography and List of Works

American author, who wrote over 70 detective novels, 46 of them featuring eccentric, chubby, beer drinking gourmet sleuth Nero Wolfe, whose wisecracking aide and companion in crime solving is Archie Goodwin. Stout started his literary career as a writer for the pulps, publishing romance, adventure and some borderline detective stories, but after 1938 all his fiction was in the mystery field.

"His face, chronically red, deepened a shade. His broad shoulders stiffened, and the creases spreading from the corners of his grey-blue eyes showed more as the eyelids tightened. Then, deciding I was playing for a burt, he controlled it. "Do you know," he asked, "whose opinion of you I would like to have? Darwin's. Where were you while evolution was going on?"
(Inspector Crames of Goodwin in Murder by the Book, 1951)

Rex Stout was born in Noblesville, Indiana, the son of John Wallace Stout and Lucetta Elizabeth Todhunter, who were Quakers. He was educated at Topeka High School, Kansas and at the University of Kansas, Lawrence. From 1906 to 1908 he served in the United States Navy as a Yeoman on President Theodore Roosevelt's yacht. He worked as an office boy, store clerk, bookkeeper, and hotel manager (1916-1927). Stout invented the banking system for school children that was installed in 400 cities throughout the USA. In 1916 he married Fay Kennedy of Topeka, Kansas. They separated in 1933 and Stout married Pola Hoffman of Vienna in the same year.

Stout's first stories appeared in among others the All-Story Magazine. He went on to sell articles and stories to a variety of magazines. In 1927 he became a full-time writer. Stout lost the money he had made as a businessman in 1929. After publishing four moderately successful novels, among them HOW LIKE A GOD (1929), an unusual psychological novel written in the second person, Stout turned to the detective story. His great achievement is Nero Wolfe, the 286-pound detective, who was introduced in the novel FER-DER-LANCE (1934), which first appeared as a serial in the Saturday Evening Post. It was followed by THE LEAGUE OF FRIGHTENED MEN, (1935), which was adapted for the screen in 1937. Wolfe's daily beer consumption is a marvel, he has yellow silk pyjamas, and he loves orchids. Goodwin's primary function is prodding his immense employer into motion.

'"Wolfe grunted. "Nothing is as pitiable as a man afraid of a woman."'
(from Champagne for One, 1959)

The phenomenally fat private eye gained wide popularity from the start. Stout wrote one Nero Wolfe adventure a year - from the 1940s some times several - until the end of his life. During the course of his career Stout mastered a variety of literary forms, including the short story, the novel, and science fiction, and a pioneering political thriller, THE PRESIDENT VANISHES (1934), in which the disappearance of the US President causes a near-future crisis. In an earlier work, UNDER THE ANDES (1914, All-Story Magazine), Stout describes an underground-lost world of dwarf Incas.

During WW II Stout cut back on his detective writing, joined the Fight for Freedom organization, and wrote propaganda. He hosted three weekly radio shows, and coordinated volunteer services of American writers to help the war effort. After the war Stout returned to his Nero Wolfe novels, and took up the role of gentleman farmer on his estate at High Meadows in Brewster, North of New York City. He served as President of the Authors Guild and of the Mystery Writers of America. In 1959 he received the Grand Master Award from the latter organization.

"Science in detection can be distinguished, even brilliant, but it can never replace either the inexorable march of a fine intellect through a jungle of lies and fears to the clearing of truth, or the flash of perception along a sensitive nerve touched off by a tone of a voice or a flicker of an eye."
(from The Golden Spiders, 1953)

Stout was active in liberal causes, and ignored a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee at the height of the McCarthy era. In later years he alienated many liberal friends by his hawkish stance on Vietnam - his contempt for communism is frequently apparent in his later works. Stout died on October 27, 1975. - The writer Robert Goldsborough has continued Nero Wolfe' adventures from the late 1980s.

For further reading: Nero Wolfe of West Thirty-Fifth Street: The Life and Times of America's Largest Private Detective by William S. Baring-Gould (1969); Rex Stout: A Biography by John McAleer (1977); Rex Stout: An Annotated Primary and Secondary Bibliography by Guy M. Townsend (1980); Rex Stout by D. Anderson (1984); At Wolfe's Door by J. Kenneth Van Dover (1991) - Nero Wolfe's address in Manhattan: West 35th Street. - Sherlock Holmes's address in London: 221 Baker Street - See also: Jacques Futrelle, American mystery writer who died on the Titanic 15 April 1912 - Films: Meet Nero Wolfe (1936), dir. by Herbert Biberman, starring Edward Arnold; The League of Frightened Men (1937), dir. by Alfred E. Green, starring Walter Connolly; The Doorbell Rang (1972); dir. by Frank Gilroy, starring Thayer David

Other works:

• THE ILLUSTRIOUS DUNDERHEADS, 1942 (ed.)
• RUE MORGUE No. 1, 1946 (ed.)
• EAT, DRINK, AND BE BURIED, 1956 / FOR TOMORROW WE DIE, 1958
• THE NERO WOLFE COOK BOOK, 1973 (with others)
• CORSAGE, 1977

HER FORBIDDEN KNIGHT, in All-Story Magazine, (1913)
THE ILLUSTRIOUS DUNDERHEADS, (1942)