Rex Stout: A biography
Customer Rating: 
I have read quite a few of the Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout. I always enjoy going into the old brownstone with Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. From reading the blurbs on the books, I gathered that Rex Stout had lived a very interesting life. John McAleer does a wonderful job with Stout's biography. He begins with his ancestry, and gives an account of his family, his first and second marriages, and the births of his daughters. He also follows Stout's early career as a writer, and tells us about Stout's EBS, a thrift banking system he invented in the late 1910's. Stout began to write the Nero Wolfe mysteries in 1934, and wrote 72 Nero Wolfe stories until his death in 1975. The thing I found fascinating was that Mr. McAleer gives us the time when each novel was written, with how many days Stout wrote and days he didn't write. This book is extensive, but I was captivated reading about the life of one of my favorite authors, Rex Stout. This biography is highly recommended.
Biography? Rather, A Hagiography of Rex Stout
Customer Rating: John McAleer's massive biography, or rather hagiography, of thelate, brilliant Rex Stout, nowadays best remembered for his creation of the fictional detectives Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin, goes all the way back to Stout's maternal and paternal ancestors who arrived in America in the 17th century.
While McAleer's volume has been criticized as "one of the most trivia-crammed and uncritical works ever written by a Professor of English" (David Langford, Million Magazine, 1992, reproduced at ...l), nonetheless it is the only complete biography of one of the most astonishing figures of the 20th-century American literary landscape.
Stout, of Quaker ancestry for five generations on both sides of his family, was the embodiment of both the puritan work ethic and the true heir of his distant relation Benjamin Franklin, in that no moss grew on the man: he kept busy from the day he was born until the day he died, originating and becoming independently wealthy from business enterprises, founding and managing literary and charitable foundations, and producing a prodigious literary output which was at once entertaining and also reflecting a liberal and world-federalist social conscience in a fashion acceptable to most Americans even at the depths of the Nixon-Jenner-McCarthy anticommunist hysteria of the late 1940's and early 1950's.
While McAleer's compendium of the minutiae of Stout's existence predicated upon long personal acquaintance, friendship with and love for Stout and his works may not be to the casual reader's taste, those of us who have dimly glimpsed the soul of one the masters of American letters reflected in his witty and amusing detective fiction can savor Stout's genius in this remarkable book.
