REX STOUT
December 1, 1886 - October 27, 1975

"As I get settled in my chair and light on the first paragraph, I would swear that reading stories is more fun than writing them."

~ Rex Todhunter Stout was born in Noblesville, Indiana.

~ Rex was the sixth of nine children born to Quakers John and Lucetta.

~ Considered a prodigy, legend has it Rex read the Bible twice by the age of four.

~ Rex became the state spelling bee champion at age 13.

~ He attended Topeka High School and the University of Kansas. 

~ Rex quit school to enlist in the Navy where he spent two years as warrant officer on board President Theodore Roosevelt's yacht.

~ After the war, he worked several different jobs, including cigar store clerk, while he sold poems, stories and articles to various magazines.

~ In 1916 Rex invented a school banking system that hundreds of schools adopted. It kept track of the money school children saved, and he was paid royalties.

~ This invention gave him enough money to travel extensively.

~ Also in 1916, Stout married Fay Kennedy of Topeka, Kansas.

~ Fer-de-Lance, Rex's first Nero Wolfe novel, appeared in 1934.

~ Rex wrote three critically acclaimed novels before Fer-de-Lance, but they  didn't reach the popularity of his Nero Wolfe novels.

~ Rex made a lifelong career out of chronicling the feats of the fat, orchid-growing, gourmandizing detective Nero Wolfe and his sidekick Archie Goodwin.

~ He, and the editors of Viking Press, compiled a one-of-its-kind, high-cuisine cookbook that reproduces authentic recipes for many of the dishes mentioned in the Wolfe mysteries.

~ Highly scheduled and organized, Rex clamed each Nero Wolfe took 39 days to write and that he never rewrote or even reread them.

~ Rex and his wife divorced in 1933. He  married in the same year Pola Hoffman of Vienna, Austria.

~ Although Wolfe was as fictional as the address of his Manhattan brownstone—his street number would have put him in the middle of the Hudson River—to millions of murder-mystery fans Wolfe was as real as Sherlock Holmes.

~ In 1959 Rex won the Mystery Writers of America's Grand Master Award.

~ When asked if he was going to write an autobiography, he said his publishers wanted him to but he thought "that any man who wrote an autobiography thought too damn much of himself."

~ Once, his secretary had arrived at work in a snit. Rex disappeared into his office and, a few minutes later, rang for her. When she appeared he handed her a disk he had cut from pink cardboard. On it he had inscribed the words, "Reward for Sharp Retort." This made her burst into laughter.

~ Rex died at the age of 89. A month before his death, he published the final Nero Wolfe book, A Family Affair.