Early life
Stout was born in Noblesville, Indiana, but shortly after that 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, 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. 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 from 1906 to 1908 in the U.S. Navy (as a yeoman on President Teddy Roosevelt's official yacht) and then spent about the next four years working at about thirty different jobs (in six states), including cigar store clerk, while he sold poems, stories, and articles to various magazines.
It was not his writing but his invention of a school banking system in about 1916 that gave him enough money to travel in Europe extensively. About 400 U.S. schools adopted his system for keeping track of the money school children saved in accounts at school, and he was paid royalties.
In 1916, Stout married Fay Kennedy of Topeka, Kansas. They divorced in 1932 and Stout married in the same year Pola Weinbach Hoffmann, a designer who had studied with Josef Hoffmann in Vienna, Austria.
Writings
Stout started his literary career in the 1910s writing for the pulps, publishing romance, adventure, and some borderline detective stories. Rex Stout's first stories appeared among others in All-Story Magazine. He sold articles and stories to a variety of magazines, and became a full-time writer in 1927. Stout lost the money he had made as a businessman in 1929.
In Paris in 1929 he wrote his first book, How Like a God, an unusual psychological story written in the second person. During the course of his early writing career Stout tackled a variety of literary forms, including the short story, the novel, and science fiction, among them a pioneering political thriller, The President Vanishes (1934).
After he returned to the U.S. Stout turned to writing detective fiction. The first work was 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). 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. After 1938 Stout focused solely on the mystery field. Stout continued writing the Nero Wolfe series for the rest of his life, publishing at least one adventure per year through 1966 (with the exception of 1943, when he was busy with activities related to World War II). Through Stout's rate of production declined somewhat after 1966, he still published four further Nero Wolfe novels and a cookbook prior to his death in 1975, aged 88.
During WWII Stout cut back on his detective writing, joined the Fight for Freedom organization, and wrote propaganda. He hosted three weekly radio shows, and coordinated the volunteer services of American writers to help the war effort. After the war Stout returned to writing Nero Wolfe novels, and took up the role of gentleman farmer on his estate at High Meadow in Brewster, north of New York City. 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 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 (reissued in 2002 as Rex Stout: A Majesty's Life).
Public activities
Stout served on the original board of the American Civil Liberties Union and helped start the radical magazine The New Masses, which succeeded the Masses, a Marxist publication, during the 1920s. During the Great Depression, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the New Deal.
During World War II, he worked with the advocacy group Friends of Democracy and was Chairman of 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 in 1943 published the essay "We Shall Hate or We Shall Fail"[1][2], and 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.
Stout was active in liberal causes. When the anti-Communist era of the late 1940s and 1950s began, he ignored a subpoena from the House Un-American Activities Committee at the height of the McCarthy era.
In later years Stout alienated some readers 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 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." Thus Stout in this book stakes his ground as an anti-communist Leftist, perhaps something like George Orwell who occupied a similar position.
Stout and the FBI
Rex Stout was one of many American writers closely watched by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, The FBI had collected 301 pages of data mostly about his association with the ACLU and when he served as president of the Authors League. J. Edgar Hoover considered Stout an enemy of the FBI and therefore a Communist or a tool of Communist-dominated groups and 'an alleged radical'. About one hundred pages of his dossier are about his novel The Doorbell Rang
In its April 1976 report, Church Committee...found that The Doorbell Rang, which J Edgar Hoover felt "presented a highly distorted and most unfavorable picture of the Bureau", is why Rex Stout was one of the 332 names placed on the FBI's "not to contact list" of "those individuals known to be hostile to the Bureau."
Radio broadcasts
Information Please (NBC)
Rex Stout was a guest panelist on Information Please, Clifton Fadiman's famous quiz show, at least four times. He joined regular panelists John Kieran and Franklin P. Adams for broadcasts on March 28, 1939 (with Moss Hart); August 29, 1939 (with linguist Wilfred J. Funk); September 26, 1939 (with Carl Van Doren); and April 18, 1941 (with Henry H. Curran, chief magistrate of Manhattan).
Invitation to Learning (CBS)
In late January 1942 Rex Stout joined Jacques Barzun and Elmer Davis in a discussion of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes on Mark Van Doren's popular CBS radio show, Invitation to Learning. Van Doren included a transcript in his 1942 book, The New Invitation to Learning: The Essence of the Great Books of All Times, published by Random House.
Our Secret Weapon (CBS)
On August 9, 1942, Rex Stout conducted the first of 62 wartime broadcasts of Our Secret Weapon...the truth...on CBS. The idea for the 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," Stout's biographer John McAleer wrote. "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." Sunday-night broadcasts of Our Secret Weapon continued through October 8, 1943.
Television appearances
Omnibus, "The Fine Art of Murder" (ABC)
Rex Stout appeared in the December 9, 1956, episode of Omnibus, a cultural anthology series that epitomized the golden age of television. Hosted by Alistair Cooke, "The Fine Art of Murder" was a 40-minute segment described by Time magazine as "a homicide as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe [and] Rex Stout would variously present it." The author is credited as appearing along with Gene Reynolds (Archie Goodwin), Robert Echols (Nero Wolfe), James Daly (narrator), Dennis Hoey (Arthur Conan Doyle), Felix Munso (Edgar Allan Poe), Herbert Voland (M. Dupin) and Jack Sydow. Written by Sidney Carroll and directed by Paul Bogart, "The Fine Art of Murder" is in the collection of the Library of Congress (VBE 2397-2398) and screened in its Mary Pickford Theater February 15, 2000.
The Dick Cavett Show (ABC)
Rex Stout was a guest on Dick Cavett's ABC-TV talk show on September 2, 1969.
