He married Faye Kennedy of Topeka in 1916. Stout decided that he wanted to do more serious writing and decided to stop until he made enough money to pursue it full-time. After that he took another bookkeeping job and concentrated on writing short stories that sold quickly. In 1911, he again sold a poem to The Smart Set and this time it was published. He visited several states and worked at a variety of jobs including usher, bookkeeper, hotel manager, salesman, bellhop, barker on a tour bus, and shrimper, before coming back to writing. Goodwin.Īfter spending a very short time at the University of Kansas, he deduced he already knew more than most students there and decided to skip college.

Before he left Topeka, he did have a brush with real life detective work when a Victor disk graphophone was stolen from him and then recovered. The magazine apparently never published it and Rex, disgusted with writing, burned everything he had written up to then. At age 17, Stout sold his first poem to The Smart Set. During this time, the family began putting on dramatic presentations for family and friends, some of which were written by Rex, some by Ruth. There, he was captain of the debate team and senior class poet. Besides being precocious in his reading and spelling skills, Rex also proved to have a great talent for math and at the age of 13, three years younger than the other students, he entered Topeka High School. The elder Stout was named superintendent for all the schools in Shawnee County, so eventually the family moved back to Bellview and then to Topeka. John Stout’s Quaker background and sense of fairness led him to decide no child would be punished without having a chance to plead his case. In 1889, his father bought a farm close to Wakarusa where Rex spent his early childhood doing chores, reading voraciously, and sharpening his debating skills to avoid his father’s punishments. Less than a year later his family moved back to Kansas (his sister Ruth was born in Girard, Kansas, in 1884.) Initially they stayed in Bellview, a district near the city of Topeka in the area now known as East Topeka. Rex, the sixth of nine children, was born in Noblesville, Indiana, December 1, 1886. When Stout died October 27, 1975, he had 57 books in print, more than any living American writer at the time.

Stout was a prolific author: this popular series alone consists of 46 novels, 40 novellas, and numerous short stories. The rotund, eccentric Nero Wolfe, along with his intrepid sidekick, Archie Goodwin, are two of the most enduring characters in literature. Rex Todhunter Stout is considered by many to be the creator of one of the greatest fictional detectives of all time. County map showing the Stout farm southeast of Wakarusa

The golden spiders rex stout