Rex Todhunter Stout (; December 1, 1886 – October 27, 1975) was an American writer noted for his detective fiction. His best-known characters are the detective Nero Wolfe and his assistant Archie Goodwin, who were featured in 33 novels and 39 novellas or short stories between 1934 and 1975, starting with Fer-de-Lance (1934).
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 as 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 and sought to benefit authors by lobbying for improvement of authors' rights under the copyright laws. He also served a term as president of the Mystery Writers of America in 1958.
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 father was a teacher who encouraged his son to read, leading to Rex's having read the entire Bible twice by the age of four. At age thirteen he was the state spelling bee champion. Stout attended Topeka High School, Kansas, and the University of Kansas, Lawrence. His sister, Ruth Stout, also became an author, writing several books on no-work gardening and some social commentaries.
Stout served in the U.S. Navy from 1906 to 1908 (including service as a yeoman on Theodore Roosevelt's presidential yacht) and then spent about the next four years working at a series of jobs in six states, including cigar-store clerk.
In 1910–11, Stout sold three short poems to the literary magazine The Smart Set. Between 1912 and 1918, he published more than forty works of fiction in various magazines, ranging from literary publications such as Smith's Magazine and Lippincott's Monthly Magazine to pulp magazines like the All-Story Weekly.
Stout invented a school banking system around 1916, which he promoted with his brother Robert. About 400 U.S. schools adopted his system for keeping track of the money that school children saved in accounts at school. Royalties from this work provided Stout with enough money to travel in Europe extensively during the 1920s.
In 1916, Stout married Fay Kennedy of Topeka, Kansas. They divorced in February 1932 and, in December 1932, Stout married Pola Weinbach Hoffmann, a designer who had studied with Josef Hoffmann in Vienna.
Rex Stout began his literary career in the 1910s writing for magazines, particularly pulp magazines, writing more than 40 stories that appeared between 1912 and 1918. Stout's early stories appeared most frequently in All-Story Magazine and its affiliates, but he was also published in magazines as varied as Smith's Magazine, Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, Short Stories, The Smart Set, Young's Magazine, and Golfers Magazine. The early stories spanned genres including romance, adventure, science fiction/fantasy, and detective fiction, including two murder mystery novellas ("Justice Ends at Home" and The Last Drive) that prefigured elements of the Wolfe stories.
By 1916, Stout grew tired of writing a story whenever he needed money. He decided to stop writing until he had made enough money to support himself through other means, so he would be able to write when and as he pleased. He wrote no fiction for more than a decade, until the late 1920s, when he had saved substantial money through his school banking system. Ironically, just as Stout was starting to write fiction again, he lost most of the money that he had made as a businessman in the Great Depression of 1929.
In 1929, Stout wrote his first published book, How Like a God, an unusual psychological story written in the second person. The novel was published by the Vanguard Press, which he had helped to found. Stout published a total of four psychological novels between 1929 and 1933, the first three with Vanguard and the fourth at Farrar & Rinehart, to which he was recruited by editor John C. Farrar.
In the 1930s, Stout turned to writing detective fiction, a genre that he and Farrar thought might be more financially rewarding than his previous novels. In 1933, he wrote 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). The same year, Stout also published a political thriller The President Vanishes (1934), which was originally published anonymously.
Fer-de-Lance was the first of 72 Nero Wolfe stories (33 novels and 39 novellas) that Stout published from 1934 to 1975. Stout continued writing the Nero Wolfe series for the rest of his life. Beginning in 1940, Nero Wolfe began to appear in novellas as well as full-length novels, at the behest of Stout's editors at The American Magazine. Stout wrote at least one Nero Wolfe story every year through 1966. Stout's rate of production declined somewhat after 1966, but he still published four further Nero Wolfe novels prior to his death in 1975, at the age of 88.
The characters of Wolfe and Goodwin are considered among Stout's main contributions to detective fiction. Wolfe was described by reviewer Will Cuppy as "that Falstaff of detectives".
Stout also wrote several non-Wolfe mystery novels during the 1930s, but none approached the success of the Nero Wolfe books. In 1937, Stout's novel The Hand in the Glove introduced the character of Theodolinda "Dol" Bonner, a female private detective who is an early and significant example of the female PI as fictional protagonist. Bonner would also appear as a character in some later Nero Wolfe stories. Stout also created two other detective protagonists, Tecumseh Fox (who appeared in three books) and Alphabet Hicks (one book). His novel Red Threads featured Inspector Cramer, a familiar character from the Wolfe books, working on his own. After 1938, Stout wrote no fiction but mysteries, and after 1941, almost entirely Nero Wolfe stories.
During World War II, Stout cut back on his detective writing to focus on war-related activities. For four years, he chaired the Writers' War Board, which coordinated the volunteer services of American writers to help the war effort. He also joined the Fight for Freedom organization and hosted three weekly radio shows. After the war, in addition to continuing to write the Nero Wolfe books, Stout supported democracy and world government. He served as president of the Authors Guild and of the Mystery Writers of America, which in 1959 presented Stout with its Grand Master Award – the pinnacle of achievement in the mystery field.
Stout was a longtime friend of British humorist P. G. Wodehouse, writer of the Jeeves novels and short stories. Each was a fan of the other's work, and parallels are evident 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). Wodehouse also mentions Rex Stout in several of his Jeeves books, as both Bertie and his Aunt Dahlia are fans.